Today at the Symantec ManageFusion 2008 event here in Las Vegas, Symantec announced during the keynote session that they had agreed to acquire AppStream, the streaming company that has been working with Altiris and Symantec for the past two years giving Altiris a boost to their SVS Pro product by leveraging AppStream's streaming technology.

I've been waiting for this to happen now since Symantec announced the acquisition of Altiris a year ago almost to the day.  Why?  It just made sense.  SVS application virtualization is extremely cool.  Throw in the ability to stream the virtualized applications and now you really have something special. 

While people are still afraid of the ASP acronym (application service providers), they aren't afraid of the technology or the thought of pushing out applications to end users.  SaaS is the new ASP (don't tell anyone), and AppStream with SVS Pro is perfect for this technology solution.

Now that Symantec has seen the light and finally purchased AppStream (bringing Altiris and AppStream back together again and for good this time), watch as Symantec hits the SaaS market in the future.  Altiris and AppStream have a lot of really smart people with great ideas, so I expect Symantec and their new Endpoint Virtualization Group to accelerate their roadmap and start coming out with new and interesting things like SaaS, streaming virtual machines, streaming operating systems, streaming desktops, etc.  Although Symantec and AppStream won't say what the future holds, it is obvious that there are many directions that they can take the technology.

They didn't disclose the acquistion price, though they said it should close sometime this quarter and that it was a private cash transaction.

A good pickup for Symantec.  It would have been a good acquisition a year ago, and it's probably an even better pickup today.  AppStream has been working on new technology and they have been showing it off at their booth here at ManageFusion.  Stay tuned!

There hasn't been an official press release on this yet, so hopefully more information will be forthcoming.