Altiris/Symantec says you can't have one without the other.
Continuing our discussion of support tools from Bomgar last week, let me report on the Altiris ManageFusion user conference in Las Vegas that happened in early April. Almost exactly a year after being acquired by Symantec, Altiris employees and users report mostly good things about the new products and integration with Symantec.
The theme of the conference was management and security must work together or networks will have neither. Supposedly Symantec bought Altiris to add network management to address weaknesses in its own product lines. Nobody from Symantec told me that directly, but it certainly makes sense for Symantec and customers of both companies.
Security is not a destination, it is a never-ending road filled with potholes surrounded by highwaymen ready to pillage the unprepared. Every desktop, laptop and server must be secured by patching the operating system and adding the latest third-party tools to ward off the hackers.
For large companies, the big push is to avoid ever having to physically go to a workstation or server and touch it for any management or security issue. Each physical visit, even if the technician is in the same building, costs a painful amount in time and money. Smaller companies may not measure productivity the same way, but they understand the cost of travel to support remote users and the loss of time when technicians are fixing individual workstations instead of attending to their other dozen or so jobs.
Microsoft’s Auto Update function has improved, and will do a decent job keeping your Windows workstation up to spec, more or less. But how do you know? What if the user turned the computer off when they were told to leave it on? What if the user changed the Auto Update setting and didn’t tell anyone?
If the device isn’t managed, how do you know it’s secure? To answer these questions you need either infinite time and great walking shoes, or management tools built for network security managers.
This sounds like a job for a tag team of Altiris Client Management Suite and Symantec’s various security products, and that’s what the product managers at Altiris/Symantec are putting together. Symantec Endpoint Protection, or Altiris Endpoint Security Solution? Do you want management agents in your security software, or security modules in your management software?
The integration hasn’t been perfect, and the situation wasn’t helped by a Symantec ERP overhaul that made headlines. Oops. For a time the story became how the system was garbled, confusing and lost orders during the Altiris transition. Bad luck that two big projects, the sales system parts of the ERP project and the Altiris integration, hit all at once. But things are better now, says everyone involved. Yes, employees have to say that, but resellers also say that, and I believe the users and resellers.
There are still growing pains, but that’s to be expected as Altiris customers and resellers try to get their heads around the huge Symantec product Line. When CDW.com has over 18,000 Symantec software products listed, you know there are some learning curve issues being cursed right now.
Taking one more big step, Symantec announced it is now acquiring AppStream, a company providing applications for download and client installation or just “check out” for one time use by authorized users. No analysts I spoke to about this were surprised. Rather, the comments were “What took so long?” Since Altiris has been reselling AppStream’s product as its own SVS (Software Virtualization Solution) Pro for a while, the integration time and disruption should be minimal.
Separate from the desktop virtualization news, attendees I spoke to are realizing enormous value in virtualizing servers. How about this case study: a company with 48 physical servers collapses them to 48 virtual servers, doing exactly the same jobs, but on four physical servers. Yes, 48 servers down to four servers. How’s that for savings?
Of course, the four servers better be pretty stout boxes, more expensive than any of the 48 servers they replaced. The customer doing the extreme collapsing bought four new IBM 3950 servers, feeling they were the best built to handle the VMWare software running the virtual servers. These servers handle up to 32 processors, so they aren’t cheap. But four of them are far cheaper than 48 other servers.
If you’re reading this as a small business person, you won’t have 48 servers to replace. However, if you’re growing, it may be worth considering VMWare and a stout server rather than two or three more stand-alone servers. A 12 to 1 reduction in server count will save considerable money, time and headaches. Why not plan smart early, rather than have retrofit an expensive existing group of servers?
