Quest Software - sold to buy something else

The 2016 sale is the part worth stating plainly, because the reason is unusually legible. Dell needed money for its acquisition of EMC, so it sold the software division it had assembled - Quest, SonicWall and the identity business with them. A company that had been bought to complete a portfolio was sold to finance a larger purchase, and the customers of all three found themselves under new ownership as a consequence of a transaction they had no part in.

One Identity came out of that group as its own brand in 2017 and sits in the same field as the identity vendors this site works with. Identity governance, privileged access and directory recovery are the unglamorous half of security: nobody buys them after a demonstration, and every organisation discovers it needed them at the worst possible moment.

There is a coincidence in the ownership worth noticing, because this timeline now records both sides of it. The private equity firm that took this company out of Dell is the same one that took Procera Networks private and merged it with Sandvine. A single investor held the deep packet inspection vendor and the identity management vendor at the same time - which says something about how this industry is actually assembled that no product comparison would show.