$10.7 Billion Broadcom-Symantec Enterprise Deal Creates Software Titan (crn.com) 30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CRN: Broadcom has agreed to purchase Symantec's enterprise business in a massive $10.7 billion deal that will break up the world's largest pure-play cybersecurity vendor. The San Jose, Calif.-based semiconductor manufacturer said the monster acquisition is expected to drive $2 billion of revenue and $1.3 billion of EBITDA (earning before interest, taxation, depreciation, and amortization), as well as upwards of $1 billion of cost synergies in the year following close. The Symantec name will be sold to Broadcom as part of the transaction. The deal will bring Symantec's $2.5 billion enterprise unit together with the software capabilities inherited last year through its $19 billion acquisition of CA Technologies. Symantec's enterprise business includes its traditional strength around anti-virus and endpoint protection as well as the cloud security capabilities inherited through the 2016 acquisition of Blue Coat Systems. "Meanwhile, Symantec's consumer business -- which includes its legacy Norton anti-virus capabilities as well as its more recent acquisition of LifeLock -- will become a standalone company," the report adds. "Interim Symantec President and CEO Rick Hill said the remaining consumer business contributed 90 percent of the company's total operating income, and the company expects to be able to continue to grow revenue for its Norton LifeLock business in the mid-single digits going forward."
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Also, Peter Norton and his Norton Utilities for DOS! :P
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This has been asked before in comments on a Symantec article, but here we go:
Toliet paper for corporate lawyers (Score:3, Informative)
That's all that Symantec sells. One of the big insurance companies would have been a better owner for it (Euro-translation: them).
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Nonsense they sell cloud based enterprise grade wiping paper. Toilet paper is the good stuff.
$1 billion of cost synergies (Score:2, Informative)
Suuuuure there's a billion of "cost synergies". Just keep telling yourselves that after you've lost all your employees worth having and everything's gone to Hell.
Broadcom is becoming a conglomerate (Score:3)
I didn't much understand Broadcom's aquisition of Computer Associates, nor do I understand buying Symantec.
Broadcom made its name (and fortune) in the late 90s as a fabless supplier of wireline and wireless communications transcievers and more recently embeded processors. How does a pure software business help them? Where is the synergy?
Companies tried to do this in the late 1970s by becoming conglomerates (for example, Gulf-Western bought Paramount pictures and Exxon bought some semiconductor manufacturers). The idea was they would be internally diversified and better positioned to weather recessions. It turned out though, that together the disparate businesses were not run as well and conglomerates didn't provide the return of focussed businesses.
In the mid-80s, 90s and beyond, many companies began to shed "non-core" businesses (often called "unlocking shareholder value") and found that the market cap of the different now independent companies was better than the original conglomerate.
For some reason, Broadcom doesn't seem to have gotten the memo and they are assembling a conglomerate. I didn't quite understand when they were purchased by Avago (ex. HP/Agilent and focused on optical components) but at least you could make an argument it was still in semiconductors. But Computer Associates? Symantec?
I'm looking forward to them breaking themselves up in 15 years... to "unlock shareholder value".
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NICs already aren't a pure hardware affair, especially outside the cheap seats; you've got your TCP offload and iSCSI support(at the firmware level, obviously any NIC that isn't broken can handle iSCSI being run on top of it in software) and RDMA and so on.
If you have a bunch of Symantec and Bluecoat features to choose fr
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Broadcom is a solutions company. The chips they make are just a part of what they sell - which is basically full turnkey solutions.
You don't buy a Broadcom chip off the shelf. You buy a chip and it comes with software to drive it. You won't get any documentation on how to drive that chip - heck, that documentation usually doesn't even exist in Broadcom. The software that gets written is because the software developer worked with the hardware designers to figure out how the thing was supposed to work.
This do
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Hmmm... (Score:2)
How are they going to split core components like LiveUpdate (not a big problem) and the AV engine, research, and definition generation (a big problem)? Which company takes over that and which gets to buy? Will the quality of virus samples go down for enterprise customer without the mass of consumer viruses being added to them? I know the bean counters don't actually wonder about these kind of things, but customers who depend on these clowns operationally need to.
Bloatware? (Score:1)