Altiris Assists Cornwall County Council to Prepare for E-Government; Altiris Speeds Up Windows XP Migrations.

Business/High-Tech Editors

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 4, 2002

Altiris Inc. (Nasdaq:ATRS), a leader in systems management solutions that reduce the total cost of owning information technology, today announced the implementation of Altiris(R) Deployment Solution(TM) by Cornwall County Council, a government body that serves approximately 500,000 people in southwest England.

Altiris Deployment Solution has been instrumental in assisting the Council's migration to Windows XP in readiness for implementing e-government. "We would not have been able to migrate within the timeframe given were it not for Altiris Deployment Solution," said Ian Turner, Cornwall County Council corporate infrastructure manager.

The Council is undergoing a mammoth migration, replacing all existing servers and deploying Windows XP across over 3,000 desktops that have previously been using a mixture of Windows 95 and 98, plus a small number of Windows NT 4.0 workstations. The migration is necessary to centralize and stabilize the County's IT infrastructure, lowering support and maintenance for machines, removing incompatible formats and generally refreshing the systems for delivering e-government.

"We want to complete the migration as quickly as possible," said Turner. "It used to be a very time-consuming task, taking us two hours per machine just to build the operating system before we could add applications." The Council uses a mixture of around 500 off-the-shelf applications as well as custom applications -- such as those used for storing census information. "At that rate, it was going to take at least two years to upgrade the entire network," Turner said.

Altiris Deployment Solution enables the Council to complete the migration in a matter of months, taking just 15 minutes to rebuild the operating system on each machine and adding additional applications in minutes instead of hours.

Turner describes using Deployment Solution as a "drag-and-forget" operation. He explains, "We choose the applications we want, drop them in and forget about them. We only have to do it once from a central console, not on each machine. We only have a small IT department and using Deployment Solution saves us hundreds of man hours."

"I am really impressed with the deployment speed," explains Turner. "We receive a lot of benefit from the option to deploy software when machines are not turned on. This feature will enable the IT department to deploy future major upgrades overnight, eliminating any disturbance to the workforce.

"In addition, if a machine is causing problems for the network, we can identify, remove and re-build it without causing disruption. Deployment Solution also allows us to almost eliminate human error. If ten people are deploying software to workstations we can be sure that they are all deploying the same thing at the same time. This reduces our support costs as we know the machines are stable."

Deployment Solution is valuable to the Council, not just in terms of saving time, but also by helping to lower support and maintenance costs. "As a large county our budget is tight and we always have to keep one eye on the bottom line. Using Altiris software has enabled us to reduce our support costs considerably," Turner concludes.

Pricing and Availability

The Altiris Deployment Solution is (pound)30.00 per node for ten nodes. Volume discounts are available. For complete information on the capabilities of Deployment Solution or to find an Altiris partner near you, go to www.altiris.com or call 0870 763 6000.

About Altiris

Altiris Inc. offers a full line of Web-enabled solutions that empower organisations to easily manage desktops, notebooks, handhelds and servers throughout the IT lifecycle. Altiris is uniquely positioned to provide fully integrated, complete systems management solutions including deployment and migration, software operations management, inventory and asset management, and help desk management. Altiris' core technologies greatly reduce the cost and complexity of owning IT resources. For more information visit www.altiris.com.

Altiris is a U.S. registered trademark owned by Altiris Inc. Deployment Solution is a trademark of Altiris. The other company names or products mentioned are or may be trademarks of their respective owners.