Symantec adds intelligent software mgt to Altiris

Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec Corp. released version 7.0 of its Altiris client systems and server management suites that, the company's chief operating officer said, in tough economic times will help drive down the cost of IT lifecycle management, and enable customers to better integrate the technology with their existing IT infrastructure, be it from Symantec or those of other vendors.

Customers are "asking for a much shorter ROI" as well as the ability to continue to shorten application deployment times across the organization, said Enrique Salem, Symantec COO, at the annual ManageFusion conference.

In addition, Symantec has integrated workflow into the system management platform "which allows us to integrate disparate technologies together," said Salem, adding that, in general, security point products suffer from fragmentation and therefore are error-prone.

While the release of Version 7.0 "was not an easy decision," said Salem, the company feels it is now ready for launch based on having run the platform on about 7,000 machines inside Symantec.

Among the new features in Altiris Client Management Suite Version 7 is intelligent software management to provide IT administrators with added detail around software audit and categorization, automated delivery of updates and enforcement of corporate policies, and reconciling that audit with actual software usage.

"We purposely moved away from just calling it software delivery," said Mark Magee, senior director of product management for endpoint management with Symantec.

The license optimization capabilities, for instance, allow organizations to reconcile devices in use and metre their usage, said Magee, "and truly understand when a software package is required when one comes through procurement."

Another cost-saving enhancement are "integrated" power management capabilities to reduce power and cost by hibernating PCs and monitors "without losing management flexibility," said Magee. It's a real money saver for organizations "by simply being more aggressive about power management in your environment."

In Altiris Server Management Suite Version 7, Magee said Symantec was looking to target "the essential pieces of server management" that are fundamental to maintaining system uptime and availability. Magee said the version includes "dramatically" improved integrated performance monitoring and alerting capabilities for flexible deployments and Smart Metrics to choose the best monitoring method. There is also consolidated event management, through an event console, that aggregates event data and correlates the impact of incidents. And, enhancements around day-to-day management include better data visualization and an updated reporting engine.

The overall enhancements in Version 7.0 are a move towards making the management suites more end-user focused, said Magee, "to improve efficiency, automation, integration throughout the entire organization and our platform, which in turn promotes a better managed and more secure system and gives greater security value propositions there as well."