While Symantec is certainly spinning an interesting story, it's also going up against some formidable competition from the likes of LANDesk Software, Novell, Altiris, and Microsoft. To a large degree, enterprises interested in structured asset management have already picked a vendor, so Symantec's job is to convince enterprise architects that since they're already buying Symantec's anti-virus software, they may as well limit the number of vendor relationships they have and trust Symantec with asset and change management, too.
The Holy Grail for Symantec is integration with its threat discovery and security management business. The problem is that this won't be a reality for two years. Meanwhile, Altiris is already there with software distribution, asset discovery and management, remote control, backup, and configuration management. Are the tools in Altiris' arsenal as good as Symantec's best-of-breed products? Possibly not in all cases, but Altiris' solutions are already integrated and only need a connection to a third-party threat discovery operation to have everything Symantec hopes to have. Also, since Symantec plans to continue to produce standalone versions of its systems, it's likely that the versions of pcAnywhere or Ghost found in LiveState won't be as capable as the standalone versions.
Furthermore, Altiris has a better to story to tell with regard to server management, including broad Unix support and a joint development arrangement with HP.
LANDesk will also lay claim to all the critical systems management pieces (other than backup), as well as take the additional step of managing non-computer assets, including phones and other office equipment.
The company is also venturing into Symantec's space with its recently announced Security Management Suite. The new product seeks to find and remove malware and spyware, improve patch management, block unwanted applications such as peer-to-peer sharing programs, and more. This eats into some of the value that Symantec brings to the table.
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