Altiris, Inc.

(801) 805-2400

588 West 400 South
Lindon, UT 84042

www.altiris.com 
 

Sales

$99 million

Business Description 

We are a leading provider of software products and services that enable organizations to manage IT assets throughout their lifecycles. Our comprehensive client management, server provisioning and asset management suites are designed to address the challenges that IT professionals face in deploying, migrating, backing up and restoring software settings on multiple hardware devices; provisioning and managing servers; tracking performance and diagnostic metrics for hardware and software; taking inventory of existing IT assets; and facilitating problem resolution for hardware or software failures. We have designed our software for use by organizations of all sizes to manage the efficiency and ensure the reliability and availability of complex and distributed IT environments. We believe that the comprehensive functionality of our products, combined with their ease of use, allows an organization to lower its total cost of IT ownership. Our products are used by businesses in a wide variety of industries and computing environments.

Products and Customer Services

Products

We develop, market and support software products designed to allow users to deploy and manage mission critical applications throughout the IT lifecycle on distributed Windows servers, desktop computers, notebook computers and handheld devices, as well as UNIX, Linux, Macintosh, RIM and Palm systems. The following diagram illustrates the phases of the IT lifecycle that our products are designed to address:

Our products are licensed to customers as integrated suites or as separate modules, depending on customer requirements. We believe this scaleable approach to IT lifecycle management enables us to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes. The following table summarizes our primary product suites, their functionality and the individual modules included in each suite:

The following table summarizes our target segments and corresponding product offerings:

Industry Background

Businesses increasingly rely on IT to gain a competitive advantage in a constantly changing global business environment. In particular, businesses are leveraging IT to reduce costs, enhance overall productivity and improve customer satisfaction by enabling customers, business partners and employees to receive a broad range of information and services in a timely manner. As a result, efficiently managing IT assets is mission-critical to an organization’s success.

The elevated role of IT, combined with rapid advances in underlying technologies, has resulted in a complex IT environment. The complexity is driven in part by the proliferation of distributed computing systems, lack of adopted standards and the heterogeneity of hardware, software assets and operating environments, including Windows, UNIX, Linux, Macintosh and Palm. A business’s IT infrastructure now is required to integrate multiple layers of networks, operating systems, databases, applications, servers and computing devices and accommodate the increase in remote access over the Internet and extranets.

The mission-critical nature of IT infrastructure, combined with the increase in technological and operational complexity, has made IT assets more difficult and costly to manage. IT professionals are required to service and support a growing number of on-site and remote users with increasingly unique requirements while maintaining knowledge of, and taking advantage of, advances in hardware, software, systems and network technologies. Further, the ongoing need to continuously configure, upgrade, migrate, provision and manage IT assets, and the failure to maintain service levels and infrastructure uptime, can be costly. Indirect costs stemming from downtime, underutilization of IT assets and reduced productivity can be even more costly. In addition, the recent economic downturn and related IT budget constraints have forced businesses to prioritize spending, resulting in the selection of fewer technology vendors, the deployment of technology initiatives only with compelling return on investment and the use of fewer qualified professionals to manage IT assets.

In order to align IT resources with these broader competitive objectives and cost constraints, businesses are investing in management software to improve the reliability and availability of IT assets through all phases of an asset’s useful life and reduce the large competitive and financial costs of poorly managed IT. This lifecycle management approach focuses on integrating functionality to track and manage IT assets from initial deployment through retirement, including maintenance and upgrade cycles, as well as the capability to continuously diagnose and resolve user problems.

Businesses are confronted with the challenge of managing their IT infrastructure using disparate systems management software products from a variety of vendors. The resulting IT environments have created a number of unique implementation and systems management challenges, largely unaddressed by other vendors’ offerings.

Lack of product integration. Many products are designed to address a single or limited set of IT management issues. These point products typically do not integrate easily with existing IT investments or management systems and have difficulty scaling to support infrastructure complexity, the heterogeneity of different operating environments and an increasingly diverse set of user needs.

Complexity of product and difficulty of deployment. Many products designed to manage IT infrastructure require the adoption of inflexible, complex and often proprietary systems management software. These products are costly, time-consuming to install, difficult to scale or duplicate and do not adequately address the breadth and depth of IT infrastructure management needs. In addition, many products do not address the most immediate and demanding needs of enterprises, such as deploying and migrating software configurations and settings.

Limited ability to address new technologies. The rapid advancement of hardware and software technologies and the increasing diversity of IT assets have outpaced the ability of many organizations to easily incorporate new technologies into their IT environments. Legacy solutions often are incapable of being extended to address the deployment, management and tracking of new IT assets, while newer products that enable the management of current technologies often do not leverage an enterprise’s existing IT management solutions. These challenges have made it difficult for support personnel to cost-effectively deploy new technologies and manage their impact on the overall IT infrastructure.

We believe that a significant opportunity exists for a comprehensive, integrated and cost-effective IT solution that addresses the business need to manage and ensure the reliability and availability of complex IT environments. Such a solution must easily integrate with existing IT investments, track and maintain IT asset productivity and enable problem identification and resolution throughout an asset’s lifecycle. This solution must also be able to accommodate rapidly changing IT infrastructures and technologies.

Competition

The market for IT lifecycle management software is highly fragmented, rapidly evolving and highly competitive, and we expect competition in this market to persist and intensify. Consolidation among companies competing in the systems management market adds complexity to the dynamic nature of the market. Other vendors focusing on multiple aspects of IT lifecycle management include Computer Associates, HP, Microsoft and IBM (Tivoli). Our strategy with respect to the offerings of IT lifecycle management software vendors is not to displace them, but instead to add value by developing and marketing software solutions that extend, enhance and complement their solutions. Other competitors with respect to various phases of IT lifecycle management include InstallShield, LANDesk, Marimba, Novadigm (subject to its pending acquisition by HP), Novell, Peregrine Systems, Symantec, and Tally Systems.

We compete primarily on the following bases:

• software functionality;

• ease of use and installation;

• cost benefit of our products; and

• integration with IT lifecycle management products, including Microsoft SMS and HP OpenView.

We may face future competition in the IT lifecycle management market from large, established companies, such as Microsoft, as well as from emerging companies. Barriers to entry in the lifecycle management market are relatively low, new software products are frequently introduced and existing products are continually enhanced. In addition, we believe that consolidation in our markets is likely to continue, which could lead to increased price competition and other forms of competition. Established companies may develop their own competitive products, but may also acquire or establish cooperative relationships with our current or future competitors, including cooperative relationships between larger, established and smaller public and private companies.

In addition, our ability to sell our products will depend, in part, on the compatibility of our products with other third-party products. Third-party software developers may change their products so that they will no longer be compatible with our products. If our competitors were to bundle their products in this manner or make their products non-compatible with ours, this could harm our ability to sell our products and could lead to price reductions for our products, which could reduce our profit margins. For example, Microsoft may not only develop its own IT lifecycle management solution, but may also acquire or establish cooperative relationships with our competitors.
 

Asset Management Software-  Category Directory

Asset Management Software Companies in the Directory

Altiris

Computer Associates

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Peregrine Systems

Remedy