Symantec acquires a desktop broker. Combined with past Altiris and AppStream acquisitions, we now have another major player in the VDI space!

I was at a Dell event last month and Altiris was there and they were trying to talk me into their streaming app solution.  I asked the guy, how does this help me if I am running a thin client?
He just stammered.  I looked at him and I said there is an easy solution. Set up the program to allow the app to be streamed to a UNC on a server that the workstation can be mapped to and then can run the app from there (better yet run via TS/Citrix) If they had this functionality they could become a player in the industry.

Symantec blows at everything and has way too much overlap with everything they've acquired.  You have Bindview, then you have Altiris....Symantec bought both of them...overlap.  You have PCAnywhere, you have Altiris...overlap.  It takes them years to intergrate these different acquisions together (look at Veritas and LiveState - that took forever)

Stream it to a UNC? Obviously, you're just as ignorant as the Altiris guy who got 'stammered' by your genius.

Do you have any idea how this solution even work? Altiris uses a disk driver to overlay the virtual disk on top of the physical one, making the virtual apps appear as though they're installed locally.

Isn't it funny how high-level admins always have the 'solution'?   

Ha!  Nice point!  Don't forget about ON Technology! 

Have they gone too far down the road of cobbling together a solution themselves to be considered as another suitor to Citrix or even VMWare in the short term? Are Symantec really serious about this and, if so, would they be willing to effectively write off their acquisitions to date in favour of a vendor with an existing, more rounded solution? Not having ever heard of nSuite, I don't imagine it would have cost them the earth so perhaps not...

I certainly like the Veritas angle and it's gone suspiciously quiet with regard to the OEM agreement signed with XenSource before the acquisition.

I too have never heard of nSuite, but I am a heavy user of Symantec prodcuts, and have been following there news/acquisitions closely over the last couple years, and I have to agree with the one guest about the overlapage.

My coworkers and I were talking a couple months back where Symantec got its start, because every product we could name that the had they had acquired from someone else including their biggest cashcow Norton.  We ended up looking them up in Wikipedia to trace back their history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symantec).  They have made some great acquistions over the years, with Altiris probably their biggest and best purchase yet.  They have also bought some weird ones like SwapDrive (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/10/symantec-buys-online-backup-service-swapdrive-for-123-million), but I guess then they wouldn't have http://www.backup.com (but really $123 million bor Backup.com ?).  I have also seen that it does take them years to integrate these different acquisions.  The are just now starting to replace Altiris Carbon Copy with PcAnyware, their replacing RDeploy with Ghost (sort of it will take a little longer for this to complete), They still have to recode SVS to include the AppStream technology and make it work with Altiris more gracefully instead being a Frankenstein solution that it currently is.  They acquired Vontu late last year, which brings the endpoint solutions too a whole new level, and the Vontu product manager mentioned to me recently that will take at least a year or two befor ethe merge the two endpoint solutions together.

So I have to agree that Symantec does "really own most of the pieces/ parts they need to build a kick-ass solution in the VDI space,"  however right now it really just a big hodgepodge of products currently that needs some serious refining before I count them as a serious VDI solution.  I really think they're just trying to stay afloat, for if the future is VDI and/or thin client for the enterprise, then their Altiris Management Suite and many of their other products will be useless.  I think it would be really cool if they could leverage the VMware VMSafe Security Technology, and make it so that you wouldn't have to install their antivirus/endpoint/antimalware on the VDI, you could instead install it on the host and then monitor all the VDI running on that host.  That is really where they need to make their moves.

If you want to see a list of all the recently acquisitions from Symantec go here: http://www.symantec.com/about/profile/development/acquisitions/index.jsp

You can see a list of all their recent acquisitions here: