Quest Development Corporation Article Index for
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Quest Development Corporation




Its principals were Kevin Azzouz , President, and Lennart Mengwall , Chairman.

Symantec contracted with Quest initially to develop Norton Backup for MS-DOS and then for Microsoft Windows . Under the terms of the contract, Quest retained exclusive ownership of all Source Code it developed, while Symantec retained exclusive marketing rights over the software. In order to provide a backup solution for the Norton Utilities for Macintosh suite, Quest acquired FastBack for Macintosh from Fifth Generation Systems taking its principal author, Tom Chappell , along as well. Sadly, the relationship between Fifth Generation Systems and the principals of Quest was not always harmonious, and spawned litigation that dogged the company for years.

In 1993 - 01 , Quest paid Symantec to terminate their development contract, then immediately licensed their backup software to several tape drive vendors, which generated a substantial amount of revenue. This revenue stream allowed Messrs. Azzouz and Mengwall to position the company for a merger, in spite of severe restrictions that Symantec had placed on Quest as part of their separation agreement. Although Symantec had produced a long list of specifically named companies that were effectively taken off the table as merger partners, they failed to see the potential competition from a hardware company such as Conner Peripherals , and so it came to pass that Messrs. Azzouz and Mengwall were able to arrange a merger between Quest and Conner's software division, Conner Software of Lake Mary, Florida , the producers of Backup Exec , to form Arcada Software .

Partially due to a conflict of personalities between Mr. Mengwall and Conner Peripheral's chairman, Finis Conner , Mr. Mengwall was bought out during the merger and did not proceed on as a principal of Arcada Software. Mr. Azzouz went on to become the President of Arcada Software.

The rest, as they say, is history, and is therefore documented elsewhere in the Wikipedia.