Symantec buys Altiris for $830mil? What a deal! I'll take 10 of those to go, and put the other 9 in the freezer...

Holy smokes.  What a zinger of a deal.  I'll have to admit, I haven't been tracking market caps of different companies in the tech sector any too close lately, not even some of my favorite go-to's, which certainly includes Altiris.  So to see Symantec strategically gobble up Altiris for what seems like chump change, has knocked my socks off and spun my head around all at the same time.

I can't reckon right off the top of my head what the product portfolio's going to look like for Symantec as a result of this acquisition, but I've always considered Altiris to be the name of the game when it comes to deployment tools for the enterprise.  Sure, there's a lot of product in the market, and some hot competition, or maybe even folks that top them in some areas these days, but they really re-defined the game back in 02 or so, when we were all sitting around wishing SMS 3 was more than a seeming pipe dream at the time.

This seems like a killer deal for Symantec.  If innovatively integrated (make sure you listen to those Altiris guys Symantec), this could redefine how Symantec's whole product portfolio is glued together and in a huge way re-establish Symantec's leadership in the OS deployment and management space.  Just having the toolset is a good place to be with increasing virtualization, but think about the possibilities with comprehensive integration with puredisk, netbackup, etc. 

Frankly, I've thought Symantec's OS deployment practice never grew into what it should have or could have been in the yesteryear of Ghost, and the not-quite-there solution instead prompted real innovation by other folks.  I'd love to see some comprehensive systems management tools integrated with some tools that are powerplays in storage management.  In my view, integration between those tools is absolutely necessary when you get highly virtualized.  This second time around, let's hope something interesting gets brewed up at Symantec.