Altiris ManageFusion Day 2

I had opportunities to speak with a number of company representatives and customers at the Altiris/Symantec ManageFusion today. The customers all offered positive statements about how Altiris' products made their lives easier. I hope some of them will allow me to post something a bit more detailed. I also saw an interesting demonstration of Altris' entry into the application virtualization market, Alitris Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) presented by Scott Jones of Altiris. I also had a chance to chat with both Keven Unbedacht, of Altiris, and Fred Jentgen, of Intel, about how Altiris was working with its partner, Intel, to implement management tools bringing Intel's VPro technology to life.

It appears that Scott Jones and I are working with similar models of virtualization when trying to understand all of the visible trends in this highly active market. That made our conversation move very quickly. Scott's system battery was just about dead and so the demo had to be fast. I was struck by how easy it was to process an application, deliver it to a target system and "turn it on." Rather than trying to isolate applications totally from one another, Altiris SVS appears to be based upon a different notion of application virtualization, one in which encapsulated applications must still be able to interact with other applications on the same system. I hope to learn more about this technology over time. I also had the chance to speak with several Altris customers that stressed how the Altris approach simplified their lives in the area of software distribution and management.

I'm still trying to fully understand the combined Intel/Altiris story. After I plow through a couple of white papers, I'll report back to you.

If you're organization is using Altiris SVS, can help me understand what the product has done to make your life easier?