I’m here in Las Vegas, specifically the Mirage Hotel, for ManageFusion 08, the spring version. Altiris, now part of Symantec, has a second user conference like this in Orlando in the fall. This is the third one they’ve invited me to, so I guess I must behave myself fairly well.
Last year at this time, Symantec just purchased Altiris the weekend before the conference started. That must have been weird for the Altiris folks, but by the fall show they talked about how nice things were inside the big yellow Symantec tent. Every Altiris alum I talked to today says the same thing, but now has more details to offer.
Headcount for Altiris is about the same, meaning Symantec didn’t purge groups of people to make the deal more financially viable. That’s good. In fact, Symantec transferred their long time disk imaging program, Ghost, over to the Altiris group. Now Ghost can be used as part of the Altiris deployment options, along with other disk imaging utilities. More options for customers usually means good things.
I haven’t talked to many Altiris resellers or customers yet, but I will. They’re the ones who will say if life is actually better under Symantec. Baseline Magazine made Symantec’s recent problems with their ERP project a front page story, so Altiris resellers may have had “fun” with that mess. More on that soon as well.
Doesn’t anybody ever write stories of how wonderful ERP implementations are? I haven’t seen one of those in years and years.
Technology Is Broken 