ManageFusion day-two keynote – acquisition and integration

The theme for the ManageFusion day-two keynote was integration and acquisition.

Greg Butterfield, Symantec group president, and Enrique Salem, Symantec COO, took the stage to kick things off. Enrique had been at RSA earlier in the week and wanted to talk about how security and systems management together are the answer for protecting information today.

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(In the spirit of the always informal and irreverent ManageFusion conference, Greg cut off Enrique's tie...)

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(...and Enrique retaliated with a make-shift head band for Greg.)

He cited recent findings from Information Security Magazine stating that 60 percent of threats within an organization come from configuration problems and 35 percent from patch issues. Because these threats can be resolved through systems management, Symantec will lead the way in integrating technologies like Symantec Endpoint Protection with Altiris endpoint management. Symantec is also working to better leverage the Altiris management platform, including the CMDB, within the Symantec collaborative architecture.

Salem also noted that April 6, 2008 marked the one-year anniversary of the acquisition. During that time the Altiris group achieved a great first year as part of Symantec. With the acquisition Symantec is now the leader in security, storage and systems management.

Enrique went on to explain that Symantec has formed a standalone group that is tasked to built out the company’s virtualization strategy and offerings. Symantec took one big step toward this goal with Enrique’s announcement that the company has agreed to acquire AppStream, a provider of software streaming solutions that complement Symantec’s Software Virtualization Solution.

Following the announcement of the AppStream acquisition, Dwain Kinghorn, Symantec VP of engineering, and Brad Kingsbury, Symantec senior VP of the endpoint security and management group, took the stage to talk security, stating that the threat landscape has changed. According to Brad, during the last five years identifiable threats have increased from 6,250 in 2002 to 499,911 today. He continued by saying that being able to manage each endpoint is a key component to protecting an organization’s environment and that is where Altiris’ years of endpoint management come into play; reiterating that Symantec will be integrating products with the Altiris management platform to give organizations better control of their systems and data.

Steve Morton then brought Symantec customer, Jesse Kozikowski from Aspirius, to the stage. After Symantec’s acquisition of Altiris, Aspirius, who had been a long-time Altiris customer, decided to implement Symantec Endpoint Protection while replacing numerous competitive security products because they saw the benefit of an integrated approach to security and management. The result, according to Kozikowski, has been seamless and effective.

It was a busy day at ManageFusion Las Vegas.