SVS 2.0 shipped on Thursday, March 23. The free for personal use version is now available on PCMag.com, the Download.com network, Tucows and SVSDownloads.com. The full 120 day evaluation product is available on Altiris.com.
Backlogged orders have been filled. The sales guys and our channel partners are now fully engaged because they can actually book SVS revenue and get quota credit for it. We got another award. The press and blogs are talking — Google hits (not including altiris.com) are up to 16,500. I’m headed to Puerto Rico tomorrow to present to a gathering of customers. Now that we’ve shipped, the partners want to get moving on integrations and comarketing. ManageFusion, our semi-annual trade show, is in two weeks, with already more people registered than we’ve ever had attend…
We are now eight days away from the release of SVS 2.0. Our Gold Master build has been posted to “Latest,” the next-to-last staging area on our internal development servers. The Altiris “Lifecycle Management Lab” (what the rest of the industry might refer to as “System Test”) is doing their thing, hammering away on the code to ensure that everything we say is fixed really is fixed, and that we haven’t introduced any new problems.
Altiris IS has rolled SVS 2.0 to most of the managed machines internally and will keep adding users throughout the week. On Friday, the GM build will be moved over to “ACC” (for “Accepted”), the last staging point before going live next week on the Altiris Solution Center and various downloads pages.
Randy and Rich have both already mentioned the InfoWorld review of SVS. (They’ve been doing a much better job of keeping their blogs current than I have.) It’s amazing. In fact, it’s almost perfect, except for one use of the phrase “paradigm shift.” That’s been too cliche for too long for any editor to allow it through. All involved parties, however, earned forgiveness for that singular transgression.
This review is a rarity in the Information Technology press — it contains not a single factual inaccuracy! And amazingly, the author, Randall C. Kennedy, didn’t accomplish that by merely regurgitating an Altiris press release or some other Altiris-provided document. He wrote the piece in his own words, not ours, based on his own experimentation with SVS, not our demo, yet was dead-on accurate. This means he actually understood the product. It’s a sad statement about the IT press that this accomplishment deserves a dropped-jaw, “wow!”
I sense some very interesting comarketing opportunities… ! 
