Altiris Moving Into Life-Cycle Management

The company plans to leverage its expertise in client, server and switch provisioning, as well as in IT asset management, to add value to its offering, said Dwain Kinghorn, vice president and CTO of Altiris, Salt Lake City.

He said the commodization of patch managment was inevitable in the face of the impending arrival of Microsoft's Longhorn operating system, which will include patch management as an integrated feature.

"Everyone knows Microsoft commoditizes features," Kinghorn said. "But [Altiris] still has business process technology, we have switch provisioning, and then there's the non-Windows story, the Linux story, cost analysis. We have all that."

The growing use of blade-style servers also offers fertile ground for Altiris to leverage, Kinghorn said. The company is ramping up switching solutions for the fabric atop networks for blade servers. And much of the effort will lend itself to products that manage both the configuration and server provisioning of a network, as well as software license management, all through the same console, Kinghorn said.

The first of such products, Altiris Deployment Solution for Network Devices, is set to arrive sometime this summer, Kinghorn said.

Altiris aims to hit the half-billion-dollar mark in revenue by 2007, Kinghorn said. To reach that goal, the company plans to crank up its channel partnering strategy.

Kinghorn did not disclose any details about the company's channel strategy, but said they involve a combination of improved partner training, MDF opportunities and more investment in electronic collaboration.