Reed G. Porter at myITforum.com

The former Altiris/new Symantec employees tried from the git-go to learn to say the name right and use the name Symantec without an expletive preceding it.  I general they did a pretty good job.  Most seemed optimistic with what the future held out for them with only the slightest of reservations. 

There were a couple incidents of overeagerness, though.  I attended a lab that used Security Expressions to ensure Trend AV was installed and functioning on the lab VM.  Some enterprising person had uninstalled Trend from all the images, apparently in preparation to install the Symantec product at the first opportunity.

On the PR front, the first day's keynote was primarily focused on Altiris's new owners with the CEO of Symantec answering some questions as to why they wanted to bring in the Altiris product line.  Basically it was because they had a lot of the pieces of end-point security and ITIL basics, but no centralized CMDB, Help Desk, Service, or effective Change Management with Remediation. So Altiris would do good things for Symantec.   Yeah, but what about current Altiris users, what is in it for us?

The ' look what Altiris does for Symantec' theme continued later that day at the product road map panel led by Altiris CTO Dwaine Kinghorn, Altiris VP of Marketing Steve Morton, and Symantec CTO Rob Clyde.   They gave good info about preliminary product direction: PC Anywhere replacing Carbon Copy, Ghost added to Deployment server, Symantec's Enterprise Security Manager being dropped in favor of Security Expressions, Audit Express's end-of-life, switch to BackupExec for Recovery Solution, and the eventual integration of Symantec's product line either into the console or through connectors.  But, it was always couched in how good all this was going to be for Symantec.  I was definitely underwhelmed and felt some of those on the platform were only marginally more excited than myself.  Maybe that message would have sounded more appropriate at Symantec Investor World '07.

Another indicator of how well my peers accepted Symantec's incursion into the Systems Manage realm would be booth traffic.  ManageFusion sets up a row of booths outside the "Partner Expo" that belong to Altiris. The inside of the expo, which is where we eat and attend a couple events, is ringed by the 30 or so partner booths.  It is a good setup and allows for relaxed perusing of the various offerings.  This year was no different except the first two booths were occupied by Symantec's Backup Exec and EndPoint Security with the 6 or 7 Altiris booths following.  Now every attendee who wanted to win the 60" TV or any of the other prizes had to visit the Symantec booths for a stamp or punch, but that was it.  While every other booth both inside the hall and out was packed with attendees, I never saw more than one or two folks at the Symantec booths the whole week.

I do hope Symantec allows the Altiris product line to flourish, and I am sure there will be some benefit to us users that the conference organizers will be able to promote at the next ManageFusion.  Hopefully these missteps were just that and can be explained by the newness of the merger.  Altiris has moved itself to second place in the Systems Management space by doing things right, let's all hope they continue to do so.

I just returned from ManageFusion '07 in Las Vegas and I continue to be impressed by the way Altiris really caters to their customers.  They really seem to listen and work hard to understand the needs of the orginization.  I met many Altiris employees as well as a raft of resellers and users of their products.  The Altiris people went out of their way to remember my name and make me and people I was around feel important.  The resellers were very excited to be involved with Altiris.  The customers were, of course, a mixed bag. 

Unlike the impression of James Gaskin reported in his Network World blog, I did not find the preponderance of  attendees to be lovers of Altiris and their products.  In fact I found the attendees to be of three  distinct types:

1. The Altiris User looking for ways to better utilize the product.  Admittedly, there were probably more of these than the others, but they had differing levels of love ranging from a necessary evil to the greatest thing since the invention of the GUI.
2. The prospective/new customer.  These folks are looking at Systems Management product or just bought Altiris and are not sure of what to to with it.  I met quite a number of these.
3. Then there was the customer who bought and installed Altiris products and were having trouble getting them deployed and used in their organization.  These were fewer, but also fell into two camps.  Those who had not invested the proper up front time to plan and roll their implementation and those who continually run into political opposition from factions in their company who do not want to relinquish some perveived power to another group. 

All three groups were helped by the keynotes, seminars, personal attention and networking available at the conference.  I was truly impressed to see genuine customer care in action.