Remember our buddy Rich Bentley?

Comments

# myITforum Newsletters said on October 25, 2006 09:30 AM:

myITforum Daily Newsletter Daily Newsletter October 25, 2006 The myITforum.com newsletter is delivered

# Anonymous said on October 30, 2006 03:15 PM:

Rod,

I’m glad you posted this as it gives me the opportunity to provide a bit of context around this for your readers.  When I first saw this article I was surprised at how negative it appeared – apparently I was aggressively bashing not only Microsoft, but all of the industry analysts as well.  That certainly wasn’t my intention, and I believe my remarks were misconstrued and definitely are not representative of my true opinions on the topic of Vista.

This article was a result of a presentation I did at the Altiris ManageFusion conference in Vienna.  There were several members of the press from various publications in attendance.  In the first few minutes of my talk I attempted to provide an overview of the market and to show some industry analyst data, with the intent being to present a measured, conservative view of the market.  Unfortunately, the article focused only on this first part of the presentation, and not what I considered to be the main themes, which included the importance of planning, best practices for migration, our product strategy, and the importance of the Vista deployment market to Altiris in 2007 and beyond.

I see Vista migration as a significant opportunity for Altiris.  Although we have some customers that will wait, we have many others that are planning to deploy it company-wide very soon after release.  I spoke with many of these customers at both our European and U.S. ManageFusion conferences, and they obviously see tangible benefits in migrating.

Over the past several months, Altiris has been putting significant effort into product development to ensure that we’re ready to deploy and manage Vista as soon as possible after it is released.  Vista migration will be the focus of a major marketing campaign for Altiris in 2007. Vista was one of the primary topics of our opening keynote at ManageFusion.  We are sponsoring an eBook, The Definitive Guide to Vista Migration, with the first chapter coming soon.  We have created a Vista resource center (www.easyvistamigration.com) which will include best practices, white papers, Web-casts and more to help customers prepare for their migration.  And we are embarking next week on a six city road show to talk about Vista deployment and migration best practices.  These are clearly not the actions of a company that is pessimistic about Vista adoption.

Hopefully this helps to clarify my views on Vista adoption. Going forward, I plan to be more cautious not to make remarks that could be easily misinterpreted, and to leave the market predictions to the analysts.

Thanks,

Rich Bentley

# Rod Trent at myITforum.com said on October 30, 2006 03:28 PM:

I wanted to highlight a response from Rich Bentley, after I posted a link to an article he commented