Altiris

» see altiris.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nobody ever chose Altiris. It was bought above you and arrived on your desk as a tray icon you did not install, in an office where somebody else decided what your machine was allowed to be. That is the whole category: the plumbing of a corporate PC estate, running from imaging a new machine to counting what is installed on it. I have only ever met this class of software from the managed end of it, which is the end where it is an irritation rather than a product.

The company began in 1996 as the software division of KeyLabs Corporation, a Utah testing outfit, and was spun out on its own in August 1998. Its prospectus puts it plainly: we began operations in 1996 as the software division of KeyLabs Corporation, and in August 1998 Altiris, Inc. was spun out as a separate corporation. It incorporated in Utah, reincorporated in Delaware in February 2002, and worked out of Lindon. It went public three months after that, selling five million shares at ten dollars on the Nasdaq under ATRS, which raised fifty million dollars and left the company with about forty-six and a half of it.

Then it grew the way enterprise software grows, which is by buying the pieces. There were nine acquisitions between 2000 and 2005, most of them small. It took Compaq's Carbon Copy technology in 2001 and what was left of Previo in 2002 for about a million dollars. The two that cost real money were Wise Solutions in December 2003, at roughly thirty-one and a half million, and Pedestal Software in March 2005 at seventy-seven. By the end of 2006 revenue had reached $229.4 million, up twenty-two percent in a year, with 992 employees and more than 21,000 customers on the books.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the ten million dollars ~

The best fact in this company's history is in Symantec's accounts rather than its own. On 12 May 2005 Symantec resolved its patent litigation with Altiris through a cross-licensing agreement that settled all legal claims between the two, and as part of it Symantec paid Altiris ten million dollars.

Twenty-three months later Symantec bought the company. The merger agreement was signed on 26 January 2007 and announced on the 29th at thirty-three dollars a share in cash. Altiris stockholders approved it at a special meeting in Lindon on 4 April, and Symantec's own annual report records the ending in one line: on April 6, 2007, we completed our acquisition of Altiris, Inc. The aggregate purchase price, net of the cash Altiris was carrying, came to about $815 million. Nasdaq filed to strike the shares three days later, and the Form 15 that ended the company's reporting obligations lists the approximate number of holders of record as one.

~ what happened to the name ~

Symantec did not retire the brand on day one. It made Altiris a business segment of its own for the next fiscal year and moved products as old as Ghost and pcAnywhere into it, so for a while the acquired company's name sat above software older than itself. Trade coverage was still writing about "Symantec's Altiris subsidiary" shipping management suites as late as March 2009.

Eventually the name came off the products. What Symantec sold became the IT Management Suite, which is what Broadcom sells today after acquiring the business, and no current product carries the word Altiris on its cover.

~ still in the installer path ~

The brand is gone from the outside and completely intact underneath. Broadcom's own support documentation for the current release lists shipping components called Altiris Client Task Agent and Altiris Base Task Handlers. The console button still reads Install Altiris Agent. The code namespace is still Altiris.NS.Utilities, and the agent still downloads from a path with /Altiris/ in the middle of it.

This is the usual afterlife for an acquired platform: marketing renames the box, and nobody renames the binaries, because renaming the binaries breaks every deployment script written in the nineteen years since. A dead company's name survives longest in the places where changing it would cost somebody a weekend.

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