Orlando — Symantec is looking to bring its storage, backup, security protection, configuration and patch-management tools under a common management umbrella that will lead to better IT policy and compliance reporting, a company executive said Wednesday.

At Symantec’s annual Cutting Edge conference, which brought together 400 of Symantec’s engineering staff, CTO for product strategy Mark Bregman said the company has begun unifying the slew of products it has built or acquired so they can share policy and knowledge data in a way they can’t today.

“Today, BindView will tell you there’s a problem, and Altiris will fix it, but today Altiris won’t share that information automatically with BindView,” Bregman said about BindView vulnerability-scanning and the Altirus patch-management, configuration and software distribution products.

The inability to share critical management data also impacts Symantec’s storage and backup products with their separate management consoles. “The problem is we have lots of products and they all do this. Wouldn’t it be great if there were one policy engine, one central knowledge base?” he asked.

Bregman said Symantec’s strategy is not to create one management console — competitor McAfee has taken that approach with its ePolicy Orchestrator — but to develop a standards-based framework that relies on adding adaptors to existing products so critical policy and management data can be translated and shared.

“If each of these has a standard way, standards such as such as Web Services WS-MAN and Active Management Technology, we can have a common naming dictionary for talking between consoles,” Bregman said. This will mean not just a better ability to centralize a dashboard view and generate IT reports but also a way to share Symantec products data with third-party systems, such as IBM Tivoli, he noted.

While Bregman acknowledged this product integration will not happen overnight, the work has begun with the Altiris products and Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 released a few weeks ago, which share configuration-management information

Bregman said next year will show evidence of further product integration. “But these will still remain point products,” he said, adding there are no plans to boil multiple Symantec software agents down to one.