If you had a $1 million IT budget, what would you buy?

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.

Clearly, virtualization is a resounding theme for IT managers in the U.S. and overseas. Increased support, and security protection, for mobile devices is another recurring theme.

Another staff member? That’s creative. But I really like the thoughts of the IT manager of the Australian Ballet, who notes that with all these purchases, they’d use the cash to purchase all of Altiris’ products to ensure that whatever they purchase, they’re able to manage it all.

So on that encouraging note, let’s enjoy the wistful daydreams of three of Australia’s IT managers:

AUSTRALIAN BALLET - Damien Calvert, IT manager

"I'd put wireless points throughout the entire building (including the carpark) and upgrade company mobiles with WiFi enable models. I'd then implement a Unified Messaging package for the phone system enabling users to make and receive calls over the wireless network and outside the hotspots (with fallback to the standard PSDN or mobile networks) including the ability to use Skype.

“I'd put a SAN in our Sydney office along with another VM server to mirror / replicate our configuration here and provide true failover and DR support for the network.

“All touring staff with laptops would get 3G (HSDPA) equipped mobiles / Blackberry's to be used as tethered modems (Bluetooth) for broadband access out of the office and overseas. New laptops would come with built in 3G card.

“Can I buy a staff member? Fibre into the office for a better VPN experience. And I think I'd then have enough remaining to buy the entire suite of Altiris products to properly manage my system.

“Anything that would make the mobile worker's life easier! (We're a touring company)"

LUTHER COLLEGE - Peter McTier, systems administrator

"If I had $1 million to spend, I would definitely look at getting some application packaging squared away for the many computer programs we install at Luther College. I would also bump up the wireless network to the latest 'N' standard and run gigabit switching throughout the entire college. I would then supply PDAs to all teaching and admin staff for use of our attendance system, emails, tasks, and calender appointments. Then from the backend, at least five power-hungry servers to virtualize of all our Microsoft Server products and school applications. I'm sure I've come under budget, but it's not every day I get $1 million!"

UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE - Catherine Oswald, IT Client Services, University Services Division, Senior Desktop Technology Officer

"We'd like to complement our current Altiris suite with PC Transplant Solution and Software Virtualization Solution. PC Transplant Solution would help us streamline our data transfers from PC to PC. At the moment this is manual and at times a very time consuming process especially considering we have 2,500 staff machines.

“SVS would enable a complete software virtualization and streaming environment on all our campuses. Being an educational institution with many various software applications, the use of software virtualization for our many applications would be of huge benefit. The ability to turn on and off application usage in laboratory areas would be advantageous. We think software virtualization will become crucial to our environment when we migrate to Vista in the future due to application incompatibilities.

“To complement all of the above we'd buy more SAN/NAS storage and VM infrastructure, better network equipment to support links into buildings and better support the whole Altiris functionality.

“Have we hit the $1M mark yet?"