The Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based software vendor, which claims half a million users for its Toad family of management tools running on multiple databases, announced a beta of a new application release management product, code-named Zanzibar, last week. Zanzibar helps automate the deployment of applications, correlates change details with performance data to diagnose problems, and records all changes and related events for auditing, said Larry Humphries, vice president of product management at Quest.

"We can dive down and do analytics at the 30,000-foot level or at the five-foot level," he said.

Quest also plans to release before the end of June tools to optimize .Net and SAP system performance. During the second half of the year, it will release products leveraging configuration management database technologies to help companies model their technology assets so that problems can be anticipated and attacked preemptively, Humphries said.

The company's overall strategy is called Application Advantage, Humphries said. As with its Toad tools, which provided a common, easy-to-use interface for database administrators, Quest's application management tools will ease the need for IT staffers to be retrained for every new application a company adds or migrates to, he said.

"I think CIOs should certainly look closely at Quest, especially for point products to solve specific problems," said Andi Mann, an analyst with Boulder, Colo.-based Enterprise Management Associates. "In application management, they are very capable and have very broad coverage."