Symantec blends Altiris products into the new Privilege Management Essentials bundle.Symantec on Sept. 13 gave customers a progress report on its efforts to integrate its $830 million Altiris acquisition into product portfolio and launched its new Altiris Privilege Management Essentials bundle.
Unlike previous acquisitions, Symantec chose to set up Altiris as a separate business unit. But despite its separate organization, which generated revenues of $230 million before the April 6 acquisition, Symantec is working to rationalize overlapping products and integrate Altiris technology into other Symantec products to improve the level of automation they deliver.
"In five months weve been able to take technology overlap and create a combined product map going forward," said Greg Butterfield, group president of the Altiris unit in Lindon, Utah. "Were also working with other business unitssecurity, data center and consumerand looking to see where we might integrate different technologies for better automation," he added.
To eliminate redundancy between overlapping products, Symantec announced that it will discontinue its Carbon Copy remote PC control offering and continue to market PC Anywhere in its stead. Symantec plans to integrate PC Anywhere with the Altiris management platform.
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At the same time, the chosen software imaging engine from Symantec will be the Ghost Solution Suite, which will be supported by the Altiris Deployment Solution for software management. Although Symantec will halt development on the RapiDeploy imaging engine now used in Altiris Deployment Solution (ADS), the company will continue to support the RapiDeploy image format in ADS.
Symantecs former ON Technology acquisition, which included the LiveState Delivery product for end point and systems software management, will give way to the Altiris Client Management Suite.
"Those customers with LiveState products are getting nice terms to move to the Altiris product set. We think product rationalization is behind us," said Steve Morton, vice president of product management at the Altiris business unit in Lindon, Utah.
The release of the new Altiris Privilege Management Essentials bundle combines the Altiris Application Control Solution and Altiris Local Security Solution. The aim of the bundle, which is a new member of the Altiris end point management suite, is to both improve control of the privilege rights of an application and to better secure administrative passwords.
The product ultimately reduces system vulnerability and calls to the service desk, Morton claimed.
"You can from central console and programmatically determine what rights an application gets for an extra level of security," he said. At the same time the Local Security Solution allows customers to randomize administrators passwords to better lock down access to systems.
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The option enforces automatic changes to administrators passwords and logs the changes. It also gives an audit trail of who is requesting changes.
Later on this year Symantec in its end point protection launch will outline how Altiris productsespecially its Configuration Management Databaseintegrate with that, and the company will outline integration efforts between Altiris technology and Symantecs backup products, Morton said.
Altiris Privilege Management Essentials is available now starting at $25 per node.
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