Reed G. Porter at myITforum.com

I just returned from ManageFusion '07 in Las Vegas and I continue to be impressed by the way Altiris really caters to their customers.  They really seem to listen and work hard to understand the needs of the orginization.  I met many Altiris employees as well as a raft of resellers and users of their products.  The Altiris people went out of their way to remember my name and make me and people I was around feel important.  The resellers were very excited to be involved with Altiris.  The customers were, of course, a mixed bag. 

Unlike the impression of James Gaskin reported in his Network World blog, I did not find the preponderance of  attendees to be lovers of Altiris and their products.  In fact I found the attendees to be of three  distinct types:

1. The Altiris User looking for ways to better utilize the product.  Admittedly, there were probably more of these than the others, but they had differing levels of love ranging from a necessary evil to the greatest thing since the invention of the GUI.
2. The prospective/new customer.  These folks are looking at Systems Management product or just bought Altiris and are not sure of what to to with it.  I met quite a number of these.
3. Then there was the customer who bought and installed Altiris products and were having trouble getting them deployed and used in their organization.  These were fewer, but also fell into two camps.  Those who had not invested the proper up front time to plan and roll their implementation and those who continually run into political opposition from factions in their company who do not want to relinquish some perveived power to another group. 

All three groups were helped by the keynotes, seminars, personal attention and networking available at the conference.  I was truly impressed to see genuine customer care in action.