Today I’m going to take a pause from discussing SVS and will write from the perspective of an ex-Novell employee and as a citizen of the world.
I heard the phrase “the Great Firewall of China” this week on an NPR report about US technology companies doing business in China. It refers to the government-imposed Internet filters between China and the rest of the world. I had not heard the term before, which surprised me. From my perspective, it is disturbingly apropos and more than just clever word play.
Disclaimer (Oct ‘09): This page is a popular Google hit. I assume that’s due to significant community interest in virtualization, esp. desktop virtualization. However, this post is now only of historical value. The market has changed. The products have changed. Altiris (now Symantec) has changed its positioning and strategy significantly since this was written. For current info on Symantec Endpoint Virtualization, visit Symantec Connect.
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Before I continue with the SVS discussion, let’s pause and define “virtualization”.
The word “virtual” has been used extensively in the IT industry for many years. There’s been the concept of “Virtual Private Network” (VPN), for example, since at least 1992 (the year of the first production IPsec VPN implementation — the concept existed for a few years prior to that). And mainframes have been regrouping physical machines into logical (or “virtual”) machines since at least the early 60’s, where a computer named Joe, for example, may actually be one of several virtual machines running on the same piece of hardware, or may have pieces of itself spread across multiple pieces of hardware, perhaps even at different locations. But “Joe” is still accessed, used and managed as one computer. That is, your “view” into the system is as one thing.
Disclaimer (Oct ‘09): This page is a popular Google hit. I assume that’s due to significant community interest in virtualization, esp. desktop virtualization. However, this post is now only of historical value. The market has changed. The products have changed. Altiris (now Symantec) has changed its positioning and strategy significantly since this was written. For current info on Symantec Endpoint Virtualization, visit Symantec Connect.
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Ok, this blog’s been online for over 2.5 weeks and I haven’t said much at all about my product, SVS. Randy Cook beat me to it with some great background information on his blog, so do please check that out. Rich Bentley also talks about it here. Randy is the inventor, architect and lead engineer. Rich is the product marketing manager (or “Market Segment Manager” as we happen to call his particular role at Altiris). Now I’ll give you the PM perspective. First, a bit on the underlying technology. In future postings I’ll talk about the importance of SVS — not just to Altiris, but to the software industry as a whole, and to our customers!
I was looking through material from one of my old personal Web sites and found my “Information Technology (IT) career tips” that I used to pass around. They were written prior to the Great Bubble Burst of 2001, so their relevance to 2006 was questionable.
See, I was one of those people who benefited from the insane expansion of the ’90’s, returning to school for an EE degree in 1994 and within two years, dropping out of to pursue my fortune. Back then, there was a massive deficiency of qualified people (I recall hearing the number 800,000 from 1998). A degree was a luxury that most IT employers didn’t care about then — all they cared about was experience and attitude (and quite often, experience was optional as well). So with friends all around me going off to work for cool companies like IBM, Netscape, Sun and Novell, I got on the bandwagon and encouraged others to as well.
Since the topic of the week appears to be wikis, I’ll share what we’ve started doing with them at Altiris.
So far, we have two official wikis — one internal and one external. I’m not involved with the internal one, but know that it’s primary purpose is to aggregate product information from across the various technical groups within the company (development, QA, customer support, documentation, consulting, etc.). This internal wiki is part of a larger knowledge management initiative. It’s the external wiki that’s my baby; it was proposed (and approved) as part of the marketing plan for SVS (which, if you missed my First Post, is my main product and the reason I’m here). That’s what I shall discuss.
