The Lindon, Utah-based company has grown rapidly in recent years as a client, server, and device management vendor, and has seen many of its compatriots acquired in the last year, as BMC Software Inc snapped up Marimba Inc, Symantec Corp acquired On Technology Corp, and Hewlett-Packard Co bought Novadigm Inc.
In the meantime, Altiris has been doing some acquiring of its own, purchasing application deployment management specialist Wise Solutions Inc in December 2003, FSLogic Inc in February 2004, Bridgewater Technologies Inc in September 2004, and Tonic Software Inc in January 2005.
The company is looking to keep up that acquisition trail rather than itself become a target, according to product manager for service management, Dave Johnson. Our company will continue to be acquisitive on our side, he said.
We are always looking to acquire companies that could be suitable for us, added EMEA marketing director, Toni Adams, who also maintained that with rapid growth, profitability, $190m of cash in the bank, and a market cap of $785m, the company is more likely to acquire than be acquired.
The value we are providing is keeping our stock price high, this is giving us a unique opportunity to grow, he said, before adding that the company will be acquiring for specific technologies, rather than market share. The acquisition strategy will probably continue, Adams said. But we’re very careful. It’s not revenue acquisitions; it’s technology acquisitions.
Altris will also look to make use of previously acquired technologies as it looks to position itself as a service management vendor this year, such as integrating the Protect product it acquired with FSLogic, which allows administrators to create a virtual application layer configuration that can be provisioned to systems and quickly rolled back again to the baseline configuration in the event of problems.
The technology is already available standalone from Altiris but will be integrated into the company’s core software suite in the first half of the year. It’s monitoring in the sense of being able to provision a service instantaneously in an on-demand environment, said Adams. It’s the next step of not just monitoring and managing, but utilizing resources as and when they are needed.
The integration is part of an overall company plan to focus on service management and step up to prove its value to business managers as well as technology managers. It’s moving from technology users to providing value to the business, said Johnson.
The things that are difficult to do are inherent to what we do as a company. From a service management perspective we’re trying to get the software out of the way, he added. In the end the technology and the complexity is hidden, added Adams.
