The Cupertino, California-based security specialist paid $150m for backup and recovery vendor PowerQuest in September 2003, followed by $100m for client and server management vendor On Technology in October, and has bundled those together with its own Ghost and pcAnywhere technologies to form the new SEA unit.
The SEA unit has its own sales, market and technical teams and is specifically targeting the provisioning, patch remediation and protection challenges of enterprise management, according to Chris Ross, VP EMEA for the business unit.
The idea is not to become a systems management player like Computer Associates Inc or IBM Corp’s Tivoli, he said, but to create a secure enterprise infrastructure by combining Symantec’s security expertise with the systems and storage expertise of On and PowerQuest.
Customers are not only talking about security, but other things associated with security such as managing the infrastructure. To be really secure you have to manage your infrastructure, said Ross.
Specifically, the SEA business unit covers five main areas, including On’s Development Studio, Symantec’s Ghost and PowerQuest’s Deploy Center Library for installation design; On’s iCommand and iCommand Enterprise as well as Ghost and Deploy Center Library for software provisioning; and ON’s iPatch and Symantec pcAnywhere for patch management.
The other two areas are IT asset management, covered by On’s Command Discovery, and protection, recovery and archive, covered by PowerQuest’s V2i products as well as Volume Manager and DataGone.
Moving forward the key is integration, said Ross. It’s based on an architecture that has a platform [On’s management console] with modules that fit in to that.
The vision is that customers deploying these modules will also interface with Symantec’s LiveUpdate service and DeepSight early-warning solution, which will trigger automated systems management and backup and recovery technologies based on set policies.
Ross admitted that the company still has work to do, but said integration would be applied gradually and that the company intends to maintain the current product set. It’s a number of product technology solutions at this point, but the integration will come, he said. The automated triggering is where the work is being done now.
While Symantec is not the brand enterprise customers would immediately think of when it comes to systems and backup management, Ross said the focused nature of the SEA business unit, combined with the Symantec infrastructure, will make an impact.
One of the reason’s that we’re a separate business unit is to ensure that the resource is there, he said. Both companies needed the extra rocket fuel and brand to take that to market. What’s going to make us different is coming to your enterprise infrastructure from a security point of view, from a management point of view, and from a backup point of view.
