A month after buying NetPro, Quest Software Wednesday said it would discontinue nearly half of its former rival's  products as part of its future management platform road map.

Of the 20 NetPro products pre-acquisition, only 11 will remain available while 13 of the 14 pre-acquisition Quest products will stay on the price list. Support will continue for the canceled NetPro and Quest software until Dec. 31, 2009.

The two companies had 11 Windows management products that overlapped and Quest is planning to keep only two NetPro products while offering users with maintenance contracts a free upgrade path to the corresponding Quest software.

The only Quest product to be cut was its Group Policy Manager. Quest officials also said that its Recovery Manager for Active Directory Forest Edition would not be part of the free upgrades for NetPro users.

The depth of cuts shows just how much overlap there was between the two companies, how Quest eliminated one of its hottest rivals, and the vendor's commitment to its line of Windows management products.

One of the surviving NetPro products will live along side its Quest counterpart.

As part of its package of compliance tools, Quest will keep its own product line (InTrust) and the NetPro roster (ChangeAuditor). Quest will eventually integrate the two products into one some time after January 2010 and provide a free upgrade path for users.

Quest also plans to create a suite called the Spotlight on Active Directory Pack that will be a combination of its Spotlight product and NetPro's Directory Analyzer and Directory Troublehooter.

Quest also will create a line of tools to aid in migration between the products, including data such as log files.

The company said the product consolidation was focused on Active Directory, identity management, compliance and SharePoint.

Bill Evans, Quest's director of product marketing, says the company considered a host of factors in order to slim its product set.

"We looked at different market demands, Active Directory configuration management, object recovery, compliance, auditing, and within those customer areas we looked at the different offerings the two companies had and we compared and contrasted the products based on presence in the market, technical superiority, ease of transition, integration with other products and maintenance costs. All those different things factored in," he says.