Quest Software, which acquired NetPro one month ago, has said that it will discontinue nearly half of NetPro’s products as part of its future management platform road map. Just 11 of the 20 NetPro products that existed at NetPro prior to the acquisition by Quest will remain, and only 1 of the pre-acquisition Quest products will be discontinued.  Quest has said that it will continue to support the canceled software products until the end of 2009.

The Quest acquisition of NetPro was a good match and an effective competition killer for Quest.  The two companies had 11 Windows management products that were overlapping, and Quest is reportedly planning to keep only two NetPro products of this type, offering free upgrades to Quest software to NetPro users with maintenance contracts.

Quest has said it will retain its own product line, InTrust, and NetPro’s ChangeAuditor. The two products will eventually be integrated into one sometime in 2010, with a free upgrade for users. Quest also said it would integrate NetPro's ongoing development of SharePoint tools into upcoming Quest software for that platform.

Bill Evans, Quest's Director of Product Marketing, indicated that Quest considered a variety of factors in its decision to slim its product set. The product consolidation was focused on Active Directory, identity management, compliance and SharePoint.

"We looked at different market demands, Active Directory configuration management, object recovery, compliance, auditing, and within those customer areas we looked at the different offerings the two companies had and we compared and contrasted the products based on presence in the market, technical superiority, ease of transition, integration with other products and maintenance costs. All those different things factored in," said Evans.

Quest also said it would continue NetPro's Experts Conference, a very popular event.