claytonblackham's blog

Symantec is known for OS management and deployment, and today announced significant updates to Altiris Deployment Solution and Ghost Solution Suite. Symantec is providing the next-generation of OS management technologies to help customers of all sizes address OS and data security concerns, the explosion of virtual systems, and heterogeneous hardware and software platforms.

The ManageFusion Las Vegas day-one keynote began with a display of energy and Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics that only Las Vegas could provide.

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We've officially launched FreshSqueeze, the Symantec endpoint management PR blog, in conjunction with ManageFusion Las Vegas. Welcome. The blog has been up and running for a couple of months, but now we're dead serious and have all the news and content we could possibly ask for for at ManageFusion.

Every commercial software developer or independent software vendor (ISV) must make significant investments in software testing, packaging, certification, maintenance and support. Much of this is an exercise in futility since no ISV can test for every variable in a computing environment.

If you haven’t already noticed, a recent Juice article by Shane McLean highlights an interesting new twist on the concept of ‘mobile management.’ At least a few IT managers are now viewing Altiris reports on their iPhone.

It’s the time of year again when Symantec migrates (south, not Vista) to Las Vegas for our renowned ManageFusion user conference. In North America we will do it again in October in Orlando as well. We’ve been holding this conference since 2004 (little known, useless fact: Altiris founded the Microsoft Management Summit before Microsoft took over and we moved on to launch ManageFusion) to give our customers and partners an opportunity to network and to learn more from the experts on systems management and security. This year we will be at the newly renovated Mirage for the first time.

InfoWorld has implemented a countdown to the end of XP sales. Actually, it’s more of a petition to save XP. As of this writing we’re 122 days until businesses will at least have to start thinking about migrating to Vista. InfoWorld currently has more than 96,000 signatures on their petition “to demand that Microsoft not stop OEM and shrinkwrapped sales of Windows XP as planned on June 30, 2008, but instead keep it available indefinitely…”

Since launching in March of 2006, Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) has been accepted with open arms in the IT community. And despite being a business application, the consumer market has embraced it, having downloaded the free for personal use version more than 200,000 times.

Symantec recently asked some of its Australian customers this question. The answers were creative, and interestingly, they’re not too far afield of what Symantec North American customers are thinking. Linda Musthaler and Dan Kusnetsky report on how members of the Altiris Customer Advisory Board would spend their money.

At the recent ManageFusion conference, Steve Morton, Symantec vice president of product management and strategy, polled the Altiris Customer Advisory Board about its highest spending priorities for 2008. Not surprisingly, virtualization was at the top of the list. Despite the potential complexities of virtualization, the ease of deploying and managing new technologies in a virtualized environment coupled with the savings in capital hardware expenditure makes the siren song of virtualization too great to ignore.