Systems Management as a Service (is there an acronym for this yet?) is finally becoming a reality. Today at Microsoft Professional Developer Conference we have announced beta launch of Quest OnDemand our online IT management services.

This is one of the projects which have been consuming most of my time for the last year so I am extremely excited that we reached this roadmap.

We demoed one of the services – our Active Directory backup and recovery (Quest Recovery Manager OnDemand for Active Directory) – on stage at PDC (will hopefully be able to post a link to the recording in a couple of days) today – and there are 2 more down the line: InTrust OnDemand (event log management) and Site Administrator Reports OnDemand for SharePoint (SharePoint reporting).

We will not be able to let everyone sign up immediately. Instead, if you want to participate, you need to go to the Quest OnDemand web page and fill out the beta nomination survey. After that you will be contacted by our product management and granted access to the beta.

This is a huge step for Quest as a Systems Management company, and in my opinion, a big step forward in cloud computing and SaaS adoption. We hope these services will help a lot of administrators out there manage their IT environments more efficiently and really looking forward to the feedback we get from the beta.

More news to come. Congratulations to the whole team involved in developing and launching this service!