Trends and "Ah-Ha!" moments from the ManageFusion Las Vegas Customer Advisory Board

I had a great opportunity yesterday to attend the ManageFusion Las Vegas Customer Advisory Board meeting. This meeting includes IT executives from about 15 of Symantec’s endpoint management (Altiris) enterprise customers as well as a handful of Symantec executives. These customers are from various industries and range in size from several thousand to hundreds of thousands of employees. We solicit frank feedback, both the good and the bad, from our customers while sharing the latest company direction and strategy.

Here are a few trends called out during the board meeting:

• Virtualization is moving from the data center and server closet to the PC and even point of sale devices.

• IT is charged with providing more flexibility and openness to the end user while keeping management, security and cost under control. Data protection while maintaining employee productivity is essential.
• Disciplines and technologies like endpoint management and security are in fact converging.

The top four “ah-ha!” moments include:

• Ease of software licensing is essential to the customer and will most likely drive a movement to new licensing strategies, like software-as-a-service.

• From the perspective of the technology implementer, green IT is nothing more than a convenient side effect of useful and cost-saving initiatives and technologies, like virtualization.
• Risk management means very different things to different customers and industries. For example, it means PCI compliance to the retailer, patient data protection and regulatory compliance to the health care provider, and to the global enterprise it means protecting data and IT assets in foreign countries where data and assets can readily disappear without a trace or any option for recourse.
• Endpoint virtualization has more use cases than any of us ever realized. It seems every customer has very different reasons to virtualize the PC or its applications. It is interesting to note that each of these customers is thinking about PC and application virtualization, something that wasn’t on the radar even a short couple of years ago.

I’ve been attending these meetings for years and this one was particularly lively…just the way we like it. It’s not always easy to get the passionate discussion flowing and Steve Morton, Symantec VP of product management and strategy, endpoint management and security, did a great job at asking the provocative questions. Being a PR guy, these meetings are a good way for me to stay grounded in the realities of IT world as opposed to the sometimes-ethereal musings of the pundits and communicators.

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