Announcing Symantec™ Endpoint Virtualization Suite

After 10 very short months, the Endpoint Virtualization team is very proud to announce the new Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suite. This release contains some really strong new features and represents the combined products from the Altiris SVS team, the AppStream and nSuite acquisitions and now, profile management. These are our four key platform areas for building a dynamic workspace on top of any underlying desktop infrastructure, physical, virtual or both. This is one of those unique moments for the team, as everyone from the separate companies had long shared the same vision and are now able to bring it to market as one solution. It reminds me of the famous A Team line, "I love it when a plan comes together."

All products have been rebranded and tested for the size of environments that Symantec customers expect, and the foundational work has been completed for full globalization and localization - boring but necessary. Each component has been rebranded as a Symantec Workspace product, a name that communicates exactly our core vision - to separate the information that makes users productive from the underlying infrastructure: applications, configuration settings and data access. User experience is made reliable, portable and centrally manageable by IT, thus lowering costs and providing an immediate ROI. Every product is developed to continue working separately as well as in a suite, so our customers can evolve their existing infrastructure with best of breed solutions that add value at each step. The products in the suite are primarily user-based and layer very nicely with Symantec's endpoint management products from the Altiris team. We think it's the best of both user and endpoint targeted management solutions.

Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV), formerly Altiris Software Virtualization Solution, is our layer-based application virtualization technology that contains applications, eliminates application conflicts and stops OS degradation. This new release extends virtualization to isolation, adds multi-user support for server-based computing implementations, has layer patching and includes some other very cool features like Dependent Layers. Some applications, whether virtualized or not, depend on other applications such as a Java environment. SWV enables you to specify another layer as a dependent layer without having to include Java in the application package. This boosts the priority of the layer so that its contents are used instead of similar components that exist elsewhere in the system.

Symantec Workspace Streaming (SWS), formerly AppStream, is our on-demand application delivery and license management system. As enterprise users consume licenses in both traditional and virtual environments simultaneously, SWS' user-based application provision system manages software assets across these different underlying infrastructures. This gives full visibility into usage patterns and takes advantage of best practices around your application EULAs, whether per-user, per-node, multi-mode, really anything. This release includes some major enhancements like streaming an MSI into a new virtual layer, fully maintaining the MSI logic and eliminating any repackaging for those applications.

Symantec Workspace Corporate and Remote (SWC/R), formerly nSuite, is the suite's connection brokering system with secure single sign-on and roaming desktop with location awareness. We have some great new success stories in queue this month on how customers are using SWC to optimize desktop management and connect disparate systems for their users.

Symantec Workspace Profiles (SWP), is our new personal workspace customization that saves settings in the cloud and follows the user across multiple devices or infrastructure environments.

Because our customer base bridges traditional and virtual endpoints, Endpoint Virtualization Suite has multiple pricing models to fit any environment, per-node, per-user and concurrent. We have many customers in this 'mixed mode' world, using a mix of these products based on their unique topology and IT goals to drive their business. No two implementations are the same, because no two sets of user communities have identical challenges and business goals. The components in the suite allow IT shops to add where it makes sense and start to take advantage of cost saving innovations in virtualization without having to make a wholesale change to the way they do IT.

I think we have now seen the entry of every kind of infrastructure delivery model to get an OS to a user that we will have to support in the near term; imaged laptops and PCs, thin clients with local execution, thin clients with server-based desktops, virtual hosted desktops, presentation virtualization, OS streaming, type 1 client side hypervisor, type 2 client side hypervisor, lightweight type 2 environments, and every combination serving single users or user communities. As talk of hosted desktops stays hot, the last several quarters continue to see big growth in laptops, and last year smart phones started to outpace PCs. As tempting as it may be to think of the future as all centralized execution models, history tells us that these models come in waves and cycles, and IT ends up supporting it all, to make their businesses productive and competitive.

As this first major release comes out, we're looking beyond it to how endpoint virtualization can continue to drive innovation, productivity and immediate ROI in practical and achievable ways for our users and customers. In the meantime, we're off to VMWorld, and looking forward to seeing you all again and getting your feedback from the demos and lab sessions at ManageFusion, Las Vegas.

Brad Rowland
Marketing Director
Endpoint Virtualization
Symantec Corporation