Bit9 and Savant Protection, which offer approaches to application "whitelisting," as well as Dorado Software, a network and services management firm, announced on Tuesday support for the Symantec architecture. The software-developer program grew out of the earlier Altiris partner program, which has about 60 industry participants.

In addition, is standardizing system management offerings for all of its enterprise-class machines on the Symantec Management Platform. The Dell Management Console will act as a "modular plug-in" to the Symantec platform, according to Sally Stevens, Dell's director of product marketing.

HP's client manager is also based on the Symantec architecture, Murray says.

Murray acknowledges that Symantec has no announced timeframe for reaching its desired end goal of all this integration effort, which is to be able to provide customers with the option for "a single common console" to manage all Symantec products.

"We don't know when that might happen," he says, noting today an IT manager might have to reply to up to five separate consoles from Symantec.