After spending three days with 1,300 Altiris resellers and customers, I believe they have developed a loyal following by working hard to support a strong product. Resellers I spoke to have made Altiris their only network management / patching / inventory / etc. product either sold to clients or used during consulting engagements. End users happily relied on Altiris and planned to use more management modules to handle more tasks in the future. To be honest, however, customers and resellers don’t spend the money and take the time to attend user conferences for products they don’t like. While most attendees have a bone to pick and want some extra support on an item or two, they generally love the product or they wouldn’t attend. While Altiris spent buckets o’ money to throw this conference (Caesar’s Palace doesn’t come cheap), every company can learn new ways to manage their customers following the lead of Altiris. First of all, any type of user meeting tells the users you care about their business and value them as customers. While you may not be able to host a fancy party in the hottest nightclub in Vegas, Pure, you can thank your clients for being clients. How often have you done that so far this year?
Second, high level Altiris executives walked among the attendees like real people, not ego-driven executives preening for the masses to boost their own self-image. You might think such behavior died in the dot bomb days, but many executives somehow come to believe they’re royalty, not employees of a company thanking its customers. Finally, Altiris provided seminar after seminar teaching resellers how better to succeed by helping their customers first and Altiris second. Customers attended seminar after seminar teaching them how to better leverage the software to utilize more features. Official training classes prepared technical people for their Ace level certification. Altiris officially became part of Symantec one business day before the ManageFusion conference. Resellers and customers nodded when told Altiris will remain independent enough within Symantec to continue their user conferences and customer appreciation parties. Let’s hope the Symantec claims prove true. Few companies do such a good job reinforcing their customer and reseller appreciation as I saw Altiris do, and it would be a shame to see Symantec change one of the things that made Altiris so successful.
