Today, I'd like to re-introduce a rare (endangered?) specie of owl: Sam.

As brightly advertised here Sam is not a random name, as it stands for Scalable Active Management. Now if you have worked with Altiris you probably know of SolutionSam, but not necessarily where that came from in itself.

SolutionSam.com was registered in 1999 when Computing Edge decided to create Active Management Solutions (in opposition to passive solutions that worked on top of SMS), the ancestors of Inventory Solution (Inventory +Solution, including Exchange +Plus, Audit +Plus etc [1]) , Software Management Solution (Download +Solution). 

Nowadays the site still holds the 6.0 solutions (a directory browsable folder [2]) and the 7.x solutions tree, not browsable but visible inside the symantec.pl.xml. It replicated via Akamai content delivery network for fast world wide availability of the content.

And here is a last funny picture with Sam, when it was working hand in hand with Sms to defeat competition:

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19991013131241/http://computingedge.com/

[2] http://www.solutionsam.com/solutions/6_0/