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Symantec said it will first address the marriage of storage and systems management before it commits to adding security into the mix next year.

For customers such as Bruce Thiebauth, software from Symantecs Enterprise Administration Business Unit will make a big impact by consolidating disparate management software, freeing up personnel and minimizing finger-pointing when events occur.

"Now you have one location to get the tools you need as a user to accomplish these [security, storage and systems management] tasks that, before, you were going to have to try to use a collection of tools to do," said Thiebauth, network manager for HP Direct, a unit of Hewlett-Packard Co., in Omaha, Neb. "Anytime you can bundle those resources together and get more functionality out of that tool, all of those issues make life easier for a small or large organization." HP Direct uses Symantec as its primary anti-virus software, as well as PowerQuests Deploy Center for imaging and Partition Magic tools internally. The organization also incorporates the technology into HP hardware when a customer requests it.

In the highly competitive systems management arena, the absence of IT asset management in Symantecs repertoire could limit its appeal. "[Symantec is] still missing a piece of the puzzle, which I think is IT asset management," said Fred Broussard, an analyst at IDC, in Framingham, Mass. "That would complete the major parts of a systems management story."

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