PowerQuest drives up image in New Zealand

By Nick Stanley

United States data protection and drive imaging specialist PowerQuest is raising its profile in the local software market in bid to gain back market share from competitors like Symantec.

The Utah-based company has been in the New Zealand market for several years, but PowerQuest Australia representative Paul Kruss said the company had lacked a retail presence here.

The company would also be pushing products based around its patented SmartSector technology that could make an exact copy of a hard drive without compressing its structure and removing performance-enhancing partitions and optimisations.

This imaging technology is featured in PowerQuest products such as DriveImage, a disk imaging program, DriveCopy, a hard drive copying program, and SecondChance, a system restoration program which takes an image of the hard drive at selected times and allows the user to return the drive the state of any of the previous images.

One of the most popular products in the US is Lost and Found, a program that enables users to recover and restore lost files.

Sean Sundwall, PowerQuest's international public relations manager, said unlike other data recovery software, Lost and Found did not have to be installed before data-loss occurred, though the disk had to be "spinning" when the data was lost.

But in the software deployment field DriveImage is up against local product Ghost, recently acquired by Symantec and Imagecast from Innovative Software. Mr Sundwall said its market share was currently only 20 per cent.

"We are now formalising our presence here.

"People should now be able to find PowerQuest's (www.powerquest.com) products at most software retailers in New Zealand."