Quest Development Corporation

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Quest Development Corporation was a small, privately held software development company in San Luis Obispo, California that primarily developed backup software under contract to Symantec Corporation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Formed in a condominium apartment just before the heyday of technology company mergers and acquisitions during the 1990s, the original Quest operation became part of Astora Software, Arcada Software, Seagate Software, VERITAS Software and Symantec Corporation. The operation in San Luis Obispo is still in operation producing data-protection software.

Quest's principals were Kevin Azzouz, president, and Lennart Mengwall, chairman.

Symantec initially contracted with Quest to develop Norton Backup for MS-DOS and then for Microsoft Windows. Quest retained exclusive ownership of all source code it developed, while Symantec retained exclusive marketing rights over the software. To provide a backup solution for the Norton Utilities for Macintosh suite, Quest acquired FastBack for Macintosh from Fifth Generation Systems, bringing its principal author, Tom Chappell, into the company as well. The relationship between Fifth Generation Systems and the principals of Quest was not always harmonious; it spawned litigation that dogged the company for years.

In January 1993, Quest paid Symantec to terminate their development contract, then immediately licensed their backup software to several tape-drive vendors, a step that generated a substantial amount of revenue. These funds allowed 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, company leaders failed to see the potential competition from a hardware company such as Conner Peripherals, and so Azzouz and Mengwall were able to arrange a merger between Quest and the Conner software division, Conner Software of Lake Mary, Florida, the producer of Backup Exec, to form Arcada Software.

Mengwall was bought out during the merger and was not kept on as a principal of Arcada Software. Azzouz became president of Arcada Software.