Interview: Altiris' Greg Butterfield

Symantec has completed its acquisition of Altiris, of which you were CEO. What's the corporate structure and your role?

Altiris will be a separate business unit with its own P&L [profit and loss]. I report directly to John Thompson, chairman and CEO of Symantec.

You took Altiris from $3 million to $230 million in six years. How much of the acquisition was about getting you into Symantec?

That's probably for John Thompson to answer. This was not a technology-only acquisition. Altiris has expertise in the midmarket. We have excellent relationships with Intel, Dell, HP, large systems integrators. We have 1,500 VARs in the midmarket space. Symantec will take advantage of what we've done to help continue its growth trajectory.There are obviously many advantages to being part of a huge company, but what about the disadvantages, such as entrenched layers of bureaucracy and the effort required to integrate both employees and technology?

My biggest concern was Symantec's track record with prior acquisitions. Symantec did the largest software transaction in the industry with the Veritas acquisition. We're much smaller than Veritas, and to be candid, I think John Thompson will admit he learned a lot going through that transaction.

We are outnumbered 17-to-1. That could be the bad, but it's also a strength because it gives us size and scale. The ability to quickly develop and release technology will be the same, I believe, based on the fact we are a separate business unit.

Symantec's data center management business declined 8 percent from Q3 '06 to Q3 '07. Might that be a drag on you?

I view it as an opportunity. We'll have more technology and resources going forward by being part of the fourth largest independent software company in the world.

What will Symantec and Altiris focus on integrating?

In the data center and our CMDB (configuration management database), one core area is application-dependency mapping. A company we were looking at several years ago was Relicore. That's now part of Symantec, so that's one core technology we'll look to.There are endpoint security technologies inside Symantec, like Sygate. And we had a hard time competing with Ghost for imaging.

The CMDB Federation Working Group, which includes BMC, IBM, HP and Microsoft, is working on a draft specification to make CMDBs more flexible by federating information from diverse sources. The last time I checked, neither Symantec nor Altiris was participating. Has that changed?

I would anticipate in the very near future we'll start participating in those kinds of forums.

Many of the companies you identified are partners of Altiris. Our overall technology strategy isn't to tell customers to standardize on Symantec. If someone is using a technology that works, we'll figure out how to integrate with it.

Altiris pulled out of our mobile device management review because it didn't feel its security components were up to snuff. Will Symantec contribute its forthcoming mobile security product toward the Altiris device-management suite?Altiris's value proposition wasn't as strong in the mobile environment. One of the reasons for connecting with Symantec is that its core competency is security. So we'll take advantage of what Symantec is bringing to market.