Sean McCown at Infoworld wrote a blog post today that said some negative things about Quest and LiteSpeed, and I had to respond. He’s switched away from using LiteSpeed, and he had an interesting set of reasons.

“I just don’t need the centralized repository in my lab, and I do enough demos that having native SQL syntax for my backups is worth something to me.”

Everybody has different needs.

Sean and I would totally agree that labs have a different set of needs than a typical enterprise or datacenter.

In fact, if I was just doing a lot of demos like Sean, and if I wanted native SQL syntax for my backups, I wouldn’t even use a third party product at all: I’d use SQL Server 2008’s new backup compression to make my life really easy. That way, you can stay purely native, and that makes for really easy demos.

Quest LiteSpeed, on the other hand, isn’t targeted just at labs and demos. It’s targeted at DBAs who need enterprise-ready backup solutions, complex needs like log shipping, centralized reporting, log reading with undo & redo for transactions, and so on. Not everybody needs the advanced features that LiteSpeed provides, and Sean doesn’t. We would both agree that LiteSpeed is not the right product for his lab.

“Even knowing any of the devs is hard these days, and getting anyone to make any changes is next to impossible.”

At smaller companies, especially startups with a minimum of customers, developers can work directly with end users. For better or worse, Quest has a lot of customers, and I’d like to think that’s because Quest has fantastic products. (It’s a pretty good problem to have.) Our product managers coordinate feature requests across all of our enterprise customers, large and small, which helps our developers focus on what they need to do: develop great software.

Just this week, in fact, Quest Software hosted a SQL Server Customer Advisory Board at the offices in Aliso Viejo. We flew out a dozen customers for two days of meetings about our road maps, upcoming features, and asking for their input on where we go next. I wish we could bring every Quest customer out there for the same input, but on the other hand, Steve Ballmer isn’t flying me up to Seattle anytime soon to ask me what SQL Server needs to do next.

We’re in a feature freeze for our new LiteSpeed v5.0. The management tools have been rewritten from the ground up, and I’m really impressed. But there comes a point where you have to stop adding new features and just focus on testing the code, and that’s where we’re at now. Heck, I have a long list of things I want to add, but even I can’t sneak ’em in – and I work for Quest! I’m already excited about the features I’m trying to cram into v5.1.

“Now, with the team being more corporate….”

If your main criteria for a backup product is easy access to the guy who wrote it, then Quest LiteSpeed is not the product for you.

Just a couple of months ago when I was a DBA instead of a Quest employee, though, that was not my main criteria for software selection. My main criteria included a global 24×7 support organization with experience across database technologies, a large QA team dedicated to testing mission-critical backup software on every possible platform and a product with an unbelievably strong track record. The fact that Quest was Microsoft’s 2007 Global ISV Partner of the Year again this year is proof that sometimes bigger is better.