With the acquisition of Altiris this week and the rapid release of a raft of system and storage management products over the last two months, it's pretty clear at this point that Symantec is signaling its intention to play a bigger role in the systems management space than Veritas did prior to Symantec's acquisition of that company.

At the time of the acquisition, Symantec CEO John Thompson said systems, storage and security management were all converging and that Symantec expected to leverage its Veritas acquisition to become a leader in that space. But, much to Symantec's frustration, the convergence of security and storage management has proved to be elusive. Everybody knows it's going to happen, especially EMC, which followed Symantec's lead by acquiring RSA. Of course, EMC tried to one-up Symantec by acquiring systems management companies to bring storage, security and systems management together eventually under one umbrella, but with the acquisition of Altiris, Symantec has managed to negate any advantages that EMC may have had in the race to the end of the convergence rainbow.

What both companies have come to realize is that the convergence of storage and security management isn't going to happen unless you own the third leg of the stool, otherwise known as systems management. And if you take that argument one step further, both companies are going to think about adding some core application-management competency to create the four legs of a chair that IT environments depend on.

What's significant about all this is that at some point in the not-too-distant future, both Symantec and EMC will begin making the case for standardization on a suite of management products that share a common framework in order to reduce the overall costs associated with running complex IT environments today.

Most IT shops have their favorite point-product tools for managing various parts of the environment, but the fact remains that each element of the enterprise today requires a specialist to master a particular tool to manage the storage, systems, security or application components of the enterprise. This creates an environment where costs are inherently higher because of the number of management products needed and the number of people needed to manage them. Over time, both Symantec and EMC will be forced to eliminate certain products as the functions of those products become features of a larger offering. And those offerings will feature a common set of user interfaces that should make it easier for fewer people to manage more elements of the IT infrastructure.

No doubt it will take years for this whole scenario to play out, and companies such as IBM, CA and BMC are not likely to sit still while Symantec and EMC maneuver to steal a march on the next generation of IT management tools. But what will be interesting to watch is just which of these companies is actually going to lead the way to creating a much-needed new approach to enterprise computing management that will rely a lot more on new technologies such as virtualization and automated provisioning than most people realize today.