The buyout group offers stockholders $25.75 per share in cash. This increased purchase price represents a 33-percent premium to Quest’s closing stock price on the day prior to the initial announcement of the Insight Merger Agreement on March 8, 2012. Dell stopped its counter bid at $25.50 last week.

This transaction will be financed through a combination of a $187 million equity commitment from Insight, a $187 million equity commitment from Vector, a rollover of at least 84% of Quest CEO Vinny Smith’s existing shares and approximately $1.2 billion of debt financing commitments from J.P. Morgan Chase Bank N.A., RBC Capital Markets and Barclays Capital.

Quest has been on quite a Virtualization shopping spree itself over the last few years and unexpectedly bought their VKernel competitor in November 2011? Earlier acquisitions to enrich their management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments incluced Invirtus (2007) and Vizioncore (2008).

Below is our latest video interview with Scott Herold, Director, Virtualization Strategy at Quest Software, taken at VMworld Europe 2011. Prior to Quest, Scott was Vice President for Product Engineering at Invirtus and Director of R&D at Vizioncore.

In its complaint (filed in the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, Aqua Connect basically alleges that Code Rebel has misappropriated Aqua Connect trade secrets, software and technologies since January, 2008.

Aqua Connect claims that on or around June of 2009, Code Rebel began distributing a product, iRAPP Terminal Server, which was the result of the reverse engineering of Aqua Connect Terminal Server.

“We have reason to believe that Code Rebel reversed engineered releases of Aqua Connect Terminal Server and packaged this as their own product,” said Renee Mehrian, EVP of Aqua Connect.

“This practice has caused many of our customers confusion, and for a majority of them, compromised the integrity of their servers’ security mechanisms. Our goal is to ensure that customers receive the highest quality version of Aqua Connect’s products as they were intended to be designed and released.”

Cukierman will serve as chief financial officer where he will oversee all finance and accounting operations and provide strategic and operational leadership for the company.

Cukierman most recently he served as general manager and chief financial officer at Fiserv where he was responsible for developing and implementing the company’s strategic plan related to revenues, profitability and growth.

Before joining Fiserv, he served as CFO of Strategic Forecasting, a geopolitical analysis and professional services company. Cukierman has also held strategic finance and consulting roles at VirtualCFO, Softbank, Accenture and Ernst & Young.

Cukierman has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas in Austin and is a Certified Public Accountant.

During his more than 25 year career in technology, Lawson-Shanks has held a variety of strategic and practical positions.

Before joining Virtacore, Lawson-Shanks served as Board Member and Chief Strategy Officer of Nimbus Exchange. He held the position of Chief Strategy Officer at Alcatel-Lucent and was responsible for designing and deploying the company’s cloud strategy.

Whilst at SAVVIS, he led the Managed Hosting Division and was an early architect of systems that became the precursors to today’s cloud computing environment. Additionally, Lawson-Shanks spent many years with Compaq Computer in Europe and the US, managing large organizations and successfully launching numerous products and services.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance enables organizations to extend their datacenter storage to the cloud. With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating a highly available virtualized storage pool that offers enhanced scalability and performance in the cloud.

This news comes on the heels of Red Hat’s announcement of its Storage Software Appliance in December 2011.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS features both synchronous and asynchronous file replication, assuring data availability across AWS Availability Zones. Synchronous replication provides users with redundancy and protection within a single datacenter or multiple datacenters and availability zones in a region, while asynchronous geo-replication offers data availability across all AWS Regions.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX-compliant, meaning that no application modifications are required for data access in the cloud.

VMware also announced that nearly 90 service provider partners now offer services that have met VMware criteria as VMware vCloud Powered, an almost 3x increase since Q3 2011.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager software will allow service providers to quickly create and deploy cloud service offerings.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager is expected to be available in Q1 2012 and will be priced on a usage-based subscription model familiar to vCloud Service Providers.

Almost 90 service providers have launched vCloud Powered services since VMware introduced the program in February 2011. The VMware vCloud Powered program requires VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) partners to offer services based on VMware vSphere and vCloud Director while exposing the vCloud API and supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

For customers using VDI technologies, F5 offers a unified approach to manage and accelerate network traffic, optimize performance, and centralize access and security policies. Unlike other proprietary solutions, F5 BIG-IP products do not require changes to the delivery infrastructure, thus offering a complement to all VDI deployments.

Support for VDI solutions is available today in version 11 of various BIG-IP products, including BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager and BIG-IP Edge Gateway.

Integrated web interface service and support for Citrix Multi-Stream ICA are new features of BIG-IP version 11.1 products, also available today.

No additional licensing is required to support VDI.

Fresh out of stealth mode, Nicira has already attracted AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace as customers.

From the official company pitch:

NVP was designed to address the shortcomings of traditional networks by offering a platform that provides the operational model of a virtual machine. While applications have been decoupled from servers through compute virtualization, they have not yet been decoupled from the network through any type of scalable network virtualization. As a result, virtualized data centers face limits to what applications they can support and where the workloads can be placed.

These limitations restrict workload mobility, thus lowering resource utilization of servers, a primary cause of operational overhead. Legacy approaches can leave as much as 20%-30% of the server capacity in data centers under utilized and drive up networking costs several fold, based on Nicira’s work with the largest cloud data center operators.

NVP forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane. This approach allows the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks, such as security and QoS policies, L2 reachability, and higher-level service capabilities such as stateful firewalling.

These virtual networks can be created dynamically to support VM mobility anywhere within or between data centers without service disruption or address changes.

Will people really call it the ‘VMware of networking’, then? Likely.

NVP software is delivered through a usage-based, monthly subscription-pricing model, which scales per virtual network port. Customers only pay for what they use, and pricing scales accordingly.

Nicira was founded by networking research leaders Martin Casado and Nick McKeown from Stanford University and Scott Shenker from University of California.

The company has raised $50 million in funding to date, from the aforementioned venture capital firms as well as individual investors including VMware co-founder Diane Greene and Benchmark Capital co-founder Andy Rachleff.

Lowe’s responsibilities will include overseeing all sales, services and strategic alliances within the EMEA region, as well as driving additional business in new EMEA territories.

Lowe most recently was vice president of sales, EMEA at Cyber-Ark Software. Prior to Cyber-Ark, Lowe spent eight years as regional director of Northern Europe for Check Point Software Technologies. Previously, Lowe held senior positions in sales management at Sun Microsystems and Nortel where he was part of the acquisition of Bay Networks.

Lowe will be located in the AppSense London office.

He holds an M.B.A. from Stanford Business School as well as a M.A. in Computer Science from Queen’s College Cambridge and a B.S. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Portsmouth.