Are Symantec and VMware like Batman and Robin?

As a Product Manager for NetBackup for VMware, one of the biggest challenges I face is around prioritization. Where does it make the most sense to spend my time? On the one hand, assisting customers on a one-on-one basis is very attractive. When I do that, I can help, say, Batman identify which product within the NetBackup for VMware suite (NetBackup Enterprise Client, PureDisk, or PureDisk Deduplication Option) is best suited to his multiple batcaves. Batman may well prefer Enterprise Client for his headquarters beneath the mansion due to its enhanced VMDK image-level DR support, but may elect to use PureDisk in his remote batcave in the Hamptons, and then use PDDO to shrink the VMDK files transferred over by Enterprise Client and VCB.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 (MR 2)

I would like to take the opportunity to share the latest status of Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0. In this update, I plan to review the latest maintenance release as well as the latest metrics we are seeing from Support. I will also give a sneak peak on what is coming next from the development team.

Maintenance Release 2 shipped to manufacturing in mid-April. MR2 includes severalfixes for customer deployment, significant improvements in SMB fit, as well as support for a few new releases from Microsoft (Windows Server 2008, Vista SP1.) This was a huge release by the team and it is making a big difference to our customers and partners. One example of the changes we made was around server memory requirements for Small Businesses. In the original 11.0 release, a customer needed 2gbs in order to run our management console. For most customers that dedicated a server to SEP, this was fine. For smaller customers that need to share the server space with other applications, it was a tight fit. With MR2, we have shrunk the memory requirements of our server to under 300mbs. This allows the management server to run on crowded servers.

On the support front, we have also made significant progress. We doubled our support staff in anticipation of the SEP 11.0 release. However, Support case volume has migrated to SEP 11.0 at a faster rate than any previous Symantec Enterprise AV product release. Historical guidance projected 50% of the AV case volume to migrate to SEP 11.0 within 6 months, in reality we reached 50% SEP 11.0 volume within 3 months.