Tuesday at Altiris: Now a Part of Symantec's ManageFusion '07 was the official start of the conference. The keynote opened with superstar conference host and V.P. Steve Morton doing his very entertaining show. The guests were Greg Butterfield and Dwain Kinghorn of Altiris, Subo Guha from Dell, and Steve Grobman from Intel.At the Las Vegas ManageFusion, the Altiris people were a little out of sorts having been acquired just a couple days earlier. I was willing to bet many would be gone by the time the Orlando ManageFusion came around. Not so! They were much more relaxed and acted more like the fun-loving irreverent Altiris people we've all come to know and love.
Former CEO and current Altiris Group President Greg Butterfield made his now traditional dramatic entrance on a Razor Scooter. He told us that employees did not defect in droves, but in fact they have more employees now than they did 6 months ago. Greg went on to talk about the ongoing integration of Symantec core products into the Notification Server architecture. Endpoint Solution, PC Anywhere, and Ghost are all slated to have visibility from the NS console in version 7.
Subo Gutha of Dell apparently gets the rock star treatment when he goes to Lindon and visits with the Altiris Group. At least what the video we were shown portrayed! Dell continues to create solutions they need themselves and offering them to their customers. If you have Dell clients and/or servers and you do not have Notification Server installed with the Dell client and server add-ons what are you waiting for? The whole thing is free and offers more information about your Dell units than you ever dreamed of.
Steve Grobman's first comment was about how they have just finished working out their desktop strategy for 2011! Intel continues to make strides in giving administrators tools to keep managing their environment for minimal disruption and risk exposure to ensure maximum uptime. Currently they are offering Advanced Management Technology which gives you the ability to administer a PC remotely even when it is turned off. Looks really cool and they are just getting started with exploring the possibilities.
Next came the demos with Steve Morton and Dwain Kinghorn trading barbs.`They (and others) demonstrated several products. The coolest had to be the new Workflow Solution. This simplifies and makes possible the automation of business processes. I've seen other products claim to do this, but I have yet been anywhere where the tasks to do a process is fully automated. Workflow Solution just might do it. It is similar to a 4th generation modeling engine where you drag blocks into a workspace and then define them. Definitely worth checking out when you get a chance.
Other demos were Norton Endpoint Security, Veritas Configuratiom Manager, and Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR pronounced beezer). Endpoint Security Solution proposes to take antivirus software up from the barely effective model of file scanning into something much better. I sure hope so. Veritas Configuration Manager has just been integrated into the NS architecture and looks a little hacked still, but there is a lot of promise there if it can deliver true state management to the data center. BESR looks cool, but doesn't everything come with a physical to virtual (or vice versa) component these days - including Deployment Server / RDP?
More demos included CMDB solution 6.5 which is available now and Altiris IT Analytics Executive Reporting, both of which I will detail further in a later post.
After the Keynote I went to a session on the new CMDB. Then I missed the afternoon sessions due to issues back at the office. The day ended with a Central Region Reception followed by dinner at a very nice steak house.