By Sarah Left, 30 June 1998 16:01
NEWS Symantec has thrown $27.5m (£17.2m) behind cloning technology, buying New Zealand-based developer Binary Research. Symantec sales and marketing director, John Wakeman, said: "Rolling out new PCs just got a whole lot easier. This is a huge win for MIS professionals." Symantec plans to target corporate users with Ghost, a cloning product it says will reduce the time it takes to install an operating system on new PCs. Binary Research pioneered the technology and Symantec will put global sales and support behind it. Binary Research's 18 employees will continue as the Ghost development team. Wakeham explained that first, an IT department nails down a standard configuration for a standard machine, then it can be rolled out onto all PCs via cloning technology. "Previously, each implementation took an hour and significant operator input. They can now image that in five minutes for a standard 300MB Windows 95 set-up, with no operator input," he said. According to Symantec, Microsoft recently backed cloning for Windows 98 and NT 4 and 5, even including an image preparation facility in Windows 98. "Previously, they hadn't supported cloning," Wakeman remarked. "They've just changed their stance."
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