The birth of Lindon-based Altiris was a happy byproduct, rather than a plan.
KeyLabs was testing software, Internet devices and more. It was the mid-1990s, and the company had a large lab full of computers that had to be reconfigured before each test, not to mention updated periodically with the latest software upgrades.
It was a mammoth job, and the company needed tools to do it quickly. It built a fully automated solution, where a technician could sit at a console, point and click and redeploy the entire lab in a matter of minutes.
Customers were as enthralled watching the lab deployment as by the testing. So the company started selling the software it had created commercially, primarily to companies and schools with large labs.
Then the companyreached a crossroads. The testing was going great. So was the software. And it decided to spin out the software assets into a separate corporation — Altiris.
Funding came from Ray Noorda and the Canopy Group, so ownership was virtually identical at first. Then KeyLabs was acquired and spun out again. Altiris, however, remained the same.
When the company was founded, according to Tyler Smith, vice president of marketing, Altiris had 12 employees. Now it has 360. Last May, it went public, "an interesting time to go public," he said, "one of the worst IPO periods in history."
The company didn't do as well as it hoped with its initial placement, but it did better than some others that went out at the same time.
When Altiris acquired American Fork-based Computing Edge two years ago, it got the platform on which the software works. It's all Web-based and allows for a browser-based console and a modular approach to developing and selling it. Smith likens it to a razor, with snap-in blades. It "holds it together, and you can pick and choose which solutions you want to buy, whether individually or as a suite."
The payoff is time, according to Altiris. Instead of takings a couple of hours to install programs on computers or update them, all can be done at once in about 15 minutes. Updates can be sent out to the PCs, instead of a tech person running around with a disk or CD to each machine. A few machines or thousands can be updated at one time, and they don't have to be in the same location.
Altiris software will track PCs and their contents, including software and hardware.
"You can do an inventory of what you have out there and what software's there, what version, what's out of date, where it's located, even if it's under lease. It can provide notification so you can take some action. It can even do things like tell if hard drive failure is imminent on a PC. It will notify of the need to back up data and replace that hard drive.
"When an employer gets a new PC, the old treasures like the granddaughter's picture screensaver and the files that have been honed over time can all be taken, automatically, to the new device. It helps large companies or even small companies manage their IT resources."
Altiris charges based on the number of computers being managed, not the servers.
"You can buy one individual piece, but if you buy the whole package, you can manage the whole process with all the data integrated into a single database and different applications can leverage that data.
"That makes us fairly unique. There's no company we know of that has the full spectrum of capabilities we have that can do all the things I've described. And what's really unique is you can do all those things on a wide range of devices, not just a PC," including handheld devices.
Altiris' first partner was Compaq, and the relationship continues with Hewlett-Packard. Altiris has strong ties with Dell and Microsoft.
Some of Altiris' customers just want the software to help their information-technology teams manage the systems. Others would really rather let Altiris manage it, taking care of the upgrades and other items.
The company has tripled revenues over the last two years and has had nine consecutive quarters of growth. It does pretty well when the economy's sound. But it also sees business go up when a bad economy forces companies to look at ways to cut costs in information technology, said spokeswoman Susan Richards.
The company has also done well, Smith said, because when other companies were spending their way through the dot-com "bubble," Greg Butterfield, Altiris chief executive officer and president, and his predecessors "tried almost to bootstrap the company. Where a lot of well-funded companies spent millions, Altiris spent a fraction and started to build infrastructure that would be required to match sales. We've gone for slow, deliberate, controlled growth."
E-MAIL: lois@desnews.com