Altiris vs SMS (Round 2)

OK, so after my recent entry about the LawNet presentation, I've received several inquiries about my statement that “Altiris is becoming less and less of a competitor to Microsoft”. Allow me to expand on that thought.

NOTE: The following is strictly my perception of the events that have evolved the systems management community over the past few years.

In the beginning, Altiris (with the recent acquisition of Computing Edge's Notification Server technology) had a much more compelling offering then Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0. Altiris’ Client Management Suite (CMS) did offer many additional benefits that SMS was either incapable of supporting or the level of knowledge and effort to do so was beyond the reach of the common SMS administrator. As such, Microsoft wisely chose the route of partnering with Altiris to provide a layered architecture that combined the best features of Altiris' Client Management Suite with the supporting scalability of SMS.

However, before long this partner relationship was in peril. For Microsoft was discovering that instead of complimenting SMS with Altiris, they were actually in direct competition with them. In many accounts that Microsoft brought Altiris into as a 3rd party solution provider to extend SMS' functionality, they found that many of the account management teams from Altiris were actually trying to push SMS out the door so that they could reap the reward of a full Client Management Suite license program. Hence the PowerPoint slide at the Microsoft Management Summit that read “ALTIRIS = COMPETITION“.

Needless to say, you don't undermine Microsoft for too long before it's noticed. As such, Microsoft began stiffening its efforts to provide feature-to-feature comparison with Altiris' solutions - still leveraging development efforts of other Microsoft teams.

Then came SMS 2003 along with the Advanced Client and Advanced Security mode. And, the landscape of Systems Management for the Microsoft Windows platform began to change very quickly. In addition to the new features, and Feature Packs (i.e. Device Management and Operating System Deployment) Microsoft also restructured the licensing of SMS to be more competitive with other vendor solutions – particularly Altiris.

Now, Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers can choose the route of SMS with only a fractional cost of implementation since Microsoft no longer requires a Secondary Site Server license*, offers the SMS with SQL Server Technology bundle, and includes (get this!) the SMS client access license (CAL) in the Core Desktop CAL. So, for a smaller sized organization that can live with all the SMS components on a single server, you’re only talking about the actual SMS and SQL license for the server and now you have a full enterprise management system; complete with Software & Hardware Inventory, Software Distribution, Patch Management, Software Metering, and Remote Control.

In my personal experience, Altiris has really started to lose the battles when they face SMS in a perspective customer site that has an Enterprise Agreement in place. When you look at the fact that Microsoft has now added mobile client support, the device management feature pack and can easily handle operating system upgrades through SMS 2003 – with or without the OSD – you see a much more competitive solution that in years past.

For this reason, I stand by my comment that Altiris is becoming less and less of a competitor to Microsoft.