Without a lot of fanfare, Symantec has been making substantial investments to compete with HP, BMC, CA, and IBM as a major player in enterprise management software. While Symantec may be best known for its antivirus software, it has been adding very compelling software offerings that will help it compete head to head with the other enterprise software vendors.

In 2004, Symantec announced the purchase of Veritas and branded its application management solution i3. We will have i3 in our labs for our application performance monitoring Rolling Review next week. Within i3, customers have the option of agent deployment or sythentic transaction management as well as correlation across application events and a unified dashboard.

This year, Symantec picked up Altiris (covered in our CMDB article in January) and continuous data protection pioneer Vontu.

For organizations interested in managing the complete spectrum of data center operations, including configuration, security, and application performance, Symantec is working to pull all of the pieces together.

The biggest obstacle will likely not be technology, but how it's viewed in the market. It may take some time for customers to see Symantec as a broader management systems vendor -- but once they do, customers may be impressed with the breadth of the company's offerings.