Symantec To Separate Into Two Companies 86
wiredmikey writes Symantec announced plans on Thursday to split into two separate, publicly traded companies – one focused on security, the other focused on information management. The company's security business generated $4.2 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2014 while its information management business meanwhile hit revenues of $2.5 billion. "As the security and storage industries continue to change at an accelerating pace, Symantec's security and IM businesses each face unique market opportunities and challenges," Symantec CEO Michael A. Brown, who officially took over as CEO last month, said in a statement. Garrett Bekker, senior analyst with 451 Research, called the decision "long overdue." "The company had become too big to manage, and they were having trouble keeping up with the pace of innovation in many areas of security," he told SecurityWeek. "The synergies between storage and security never really emerged, in part because in many firms, particularly large enterprises, they are managed by different internal teams."
HP, Symantec...getting closer and closer... (Score:4, Funny)
split into Micro and Soft. (Score:4, Insightful)
That would have been an excellent idea about 10-15 years ago. Lots of people thought that splitting it into MS Applications (Word, Excel, etc.) and MS OS (Windows, etc.) would have been a great thing all the way around.
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I think they should separate into zero companies.
Re:HP, Symantec...getting closer and closer... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm waiting for Comcast to split into Hades and Gehenna.
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are they relevant? well, they are as in the way that getting rid of them is relevant. they're like malware...
or rather, having malware is less of a slowdown than symanshit scanning every file you access(and despite that failing on the nasty kind of targeted malware)
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By use, I mean purchase ....
Summary says $4,200,000,000 last year, so I guess that's an answer for you.
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That's a lot of Windows users unthinkingly renewing the subscription to the first-year-free Norton Slug that came with their computer.
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I'm sure they do, from force of habit, which is why I keep encountering sluggish Windows systems that spring back to life as soon as I exorcise Norton Antivirus and put in Microsoft Security Essentials or Avast.
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An anecdote is a tale someone else relates to you. I'm relating experiences.
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What do I take from that?
Never again trust whoever did those benchmarks! They likely benchmarked the corporate, network version and used unclear English to make people think it was the awful thing they have.
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I will never know. Some stink just won't wash out.
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Why would it be 'rational' to go back to a company that has already demonstrated complete disregard for the user? Especially when there are superior free alternatives that have been good and trustworthy for decades? Their business model remains; include their crap on new machines, get suckers to pay for it. If it's slightly less crappy, who cares?
Seriously. Do you work for them? I can think of no other reason for your position.
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Why would it be 'rational' to go back to a company that has already demonstrated complete disregard for the user?
Since when is "responding to customer concerns with an effective fix" complete disregard for customers? It seems exactly the opposite. The product has tested well for protection and top or near top for performance for the better part of a decade now; holding onto some past injury for what (in tech) is essentially a century is not rational.
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I was willing to accept your assertion that it's good now. But 'it's been good for ten years'. Bullshit on you!
How long does it take to 'forgive' a company that distributes almost ransomeware software that requires an OS pave-over to get rid of? Impossible to set in years. 100% management turnover is a prerequisite. Vendors can ether be trusted or they can't, those can't.
Remember the dual with the third party uninstallers? Norton and McAfee both kept finding new places to hide, kind of like a virus.
E
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I was willing to accept your assertion that it's good now. But 'it's been good for ten years'. Bullshit on you!
"The better part of a decade" would be anything more than 5 years. I'm sticking to facts here, I'm sorry if they don't line up with your preconceived notions.
The return of.. (Score:3)
Re:The return of.. (Score:5, Funny)
Because software like Norton Antivirus have sullied it, Peter Norton has changed his name to something less offensive. He's now known as Peter Hitler.
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Strange split (Score:1)
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one that produces virii, one that "protects" from them.
I thought that they worked hard to create a virus that slipped through their $competitors, but would get caught by $their_own. Isn't that why things work the way they do in the antivirus field? Why else would one antivirus package already detect a virus that all the others don't yet?
Synergies never emerge (Score:2)
HP is a great example... one division responsible for a tool such as Fortify wants full price (or more) for another's use of the tool, though they'd both benefit. Every company I've worked for typically has one group trying to overcharge another, or even outright backstabbing, which is a real shame, because it only hurts the overall company's bottom line.
That's what you get when you put greedy MBAs in charge, worse when they don't reign in the behavior of their underlings, who are simply emulating their bos
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When the money transfers cause people to avoid utilization or purchase another product, it can be a real harm to the company (unless it is more than offset by some benefit from using the competing product - though that should REALLY motivate you to fix something).
On the other hand, as long as it doesn't affect decision-making these sorts of things can have legitimate accounting purposes. At my workplace we realized it would be a lot simpler from an accounting/legal standpoint if we just charged our supplie
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Never is an awfully strong word. Just off the top of my head, Apple/Siri, Micron/Elpida, and Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad have all been extremely successful mergers with obvious synergies. But most successful mergers are boring and don't make the news much, whereas we've been hearing about HP's ongoing woes for at least three solid years.
This is about stock price, the rest is bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Two smaller companies don't have to grow revenues as much to meet the EPS thresholds that institutional investors demand. They ONLY other option was to become IBM and that's to simply run around BUYING other companies.
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"They ONLY other option was to become IBM and that's to simply run around BUYING other companies."
That was Symantec for most of the last ten years.
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They could just buy back their stock if they were so worried about EPS.
Why the fuck would they do that? They know it's overvalued. They want to sell that shit off before the ship sinks.
Well.. (Score:1)
It's just a matter of semantics
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Shit, I thought this post was serious, until I saw who signed it.
Excuse me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is Symantec doing anything useful?
I think the last useful version of Norton Utilities was 6.0, which was before the Symantec buyout?
Now they're just marketing fear...
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They're a great selling point for me. A former boss of mine always said "We don't say anything negative about our competitors. We say 'Symantec software comes in really great looking boxes'".
We need Symantec in the biz. It's usually easy to sell when you compare your product with something from "industry standard Symantec" and you can easily show how you surpass them.
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Well, they bought Verisign so if you used their SSL services you were switched to Symantec. And it appears that they still have a lot of market share in that area even though I'm sure a lot of existing Verisign customers screamed Nooooooo!! at the top of their lungs when they heard about the buyout and switched to something else as soon as possible*.
*He says from experience!
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Is Symantec doing anything useful? I think the last useful version of Norton Utilities was 6.0, which was before the Symantec buyout? Now they're just marketing fear...
Referencing Norton Utilities is like referencing buggy whips. It was a brilliant product in the DOS era, when it was necessary. It was less and less useful as Windows emerged and obsoleted most of its features. Once the OS contained a defrag utility, NU had less purpose to exist, for example. This is why PC Tools is also not around in anything like its original form.
On the other hand, yes, Symantec does plenty of useful things. For instance, their e-mail content control software and hardware, based o
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Norton Utilities 6.0 *was* DOS :)
You're saying their "enterprise products" aren't bloated, useless, fearmongering piles of crap?
Maybe that's why they're splitting, no one who has experienced the consumer products will believe that.
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Norton Utilities 6.0 *was* DOS :)
Do you remember by any chance one of the utilities called NDOS? It was a command.com shell replacement that was massively more powerful. Things like tab filename completion, arrow up/down command history, and a tonne of variables. Technically NDOS was a licensed version of a JPSoft product called 4DOS. Well, 4DOS ended up having an OS/2 version, 4OS2. Then they compiled a native WinNT version, 4NT. That has eventually changed product names to TCC. Which I still use on all the machines I have responsi
Veritas rewind (Score:2, Insightful)
Call the information management side "Veritas" and apologize to the long time NetBackup customers for the Symantec years. They are lucky that some of us didn't jump ship after NBU was absorbed. Support, community and quality all took a hit.
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*gasp* What's your next expectation, separation of industry and politics?
Is "general manager" the same as CEO? (Score:2)
John Gannon is supposed to be the new "general manager" of the Info Mgmt business - if he's not the CEO and Brown is still going to be in charge, what's the fucking point?
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He likely will be the CEO once the split is complete.
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What will the new divisions be like? (Score:3, Insightful)
One that doesn't know how to make antivirus and one that doesn't have a clue about firewalls?
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I thought that's what HP did, with one company doing the printers and the other one doing the ink?
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Typical corporate due diligence (Score:2)
How could this have possibly been a surprise to the people responsible for pulling off the merger? How large and thick the blinders must have been for this to not be recognized until after all the money had been spent during the acquisition and the obligatory layoffs of the redundant took place?
Wow (Score:2)
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They own PGP. Which is a major part of the backbone of their security segment.
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Me too. I run Linux now.
Spin-off? (Score:1)
When I read the title I thought it would split (Score:2)
into one division that writes the viruses and another that writes the antivirus.