October 30th, 2009

McAfee vs. Symantec: Dueling in consumer and enterprise

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 3:00 am

Categories: Earnings, Economy, General, Security, Symantec

Tags: McAfee Inc., Revenue, Symantec Corp., Security, Larry Dignan

The most recent quarterly reports from McAfee and Symantec highlight some trench warfare in both the enterprise and consumer markets.

Both companies reported solid quarters, but Symantec was the one that really knocked the cover off the ball. Symantec reported fiscal second quarter net income of $150 million, or 18 cents a share, on revenue of $1.47 billion. Non-GAAP earnings were 36 cents a share, three cents ahead of Wall Street estimates.

But what was curious is the reason behind Symantec’s surge. Sure, CEO Enrique Salem has given Symantec more focus, but the quarter got a lift from small and mid-sized businesses and consumers. The consumer business coupled with improving enterprise trends enabled Symantec to maintain its outlook for the next quarter.

Salem said on a conference call:

We started to see initial signs of progress in SMB security as we renewed our relationships with channel partners given the launch of our new security products. We also saw strength in the consumer segment as our business continues to benefit from our market-leading products…The strength of our Consumer business was driven by strong Norton 360 sales and by our relationships with eight of the top nine OEMs…During the quarter, we won consumer online backup deals with Toshiba and Acer. We now have backup relationships with four of the top five OEMs.

Add it up and Symantec’s consumer business was up 6 percent to $463 million in the second quarter compared to a year ago. All other businesses—security and compliance and storage—were down anywhere from 3 percent to 9 percent.

Enter McAfee. McAfee’s quarter was also solid (statement). The company reported fiscal third quarter earnings of $36.8 million, or 23 cents a share, on revenue of $485.3 million, up 18 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 62 cents a share, two cents better than estimates. Revenue, however, fell short of the $487 million projected by Wall Street.

McAfee also projected fiscal fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings of 61 cents a share to 65 cents a share. Wall Street was looking for 63 cents a share.

Under the hood though, McAfee showed a 25 percent jump in its corporate business. Third quarter corporate revenue checked in at $308 million. On the consumer side of the house, McAfee had revenue of $177 million, up 8 percent from a year ago.

Based on growth rates, it appears Symantec is taking it to McAfee in the consumer market. In the enterprise, McAfee, which is much smaller than Symantec, appears to be gaining some strength from a smaller base.

July 29th, 2009

Symantec: Corporate customers moving to shorter contracts

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 1:57 pm

Categories: General, Security, Storage, Symantec

Tags: Revenue, Symantec Corp., Non-GAAP Revenue, Security, Larry Dignan

Symantec’s fiscal first quarter fell short of expectations as corporate customers opted for shorter-term maintenance and license renewals.

The company, which makes security and storage software, reported first quarter net income of $73, million, or 9 cents a share, down from $172 million, or 20 cents a share a year ago (statement). On a non-GAAP basis, Symantec reported first quarter earnings of $285 million, or 34 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting 35 cents a share. Symantec’s revenue for the first quarter was $1.43 billion, down 13 percent from a year ago.

Analysts have noted that security spending has been spotty. In addition, competition has been fierce. In a research note, Jeffries analyst Katherine Egbert said:

Read the rest of this entry »

April 21st, 2009

Symantec CEO: The future of security [video]

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 2:48 pm

Categories: General, Security, Symantec

Tags:

At the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Symantec CEO Enrique Salem reveals what he thinks the security of the future will look like. Among the things he says we need to do? Make security risk-based, info-centric, automated, and work-flow driven to keep up with security threats.

January 26th, 2009

Symantec dabbles with cloud app aggregation; Launches beta of GoEverywhere

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 11:47 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0, General, Software Infrastructure, Storage, Symantec

Tags: Symantec Corp., Beta, GoEverywhere, Security, Larry Dignan

Symantec on Monday rolled out a beta for GoEverywhere, a online workspace/storage hub that allows anyone to access Web applications.

The security company says GoEverywhere is a product of its business incubator that hunts for new business opportunities.

Thus far demand must be doing ok. After registering for the beta I received the following message:

“After processing you will receive an email from our single sign on server: donotreply@myonelogin.com. Some mail tools may detect this as spam so please also check your spam folder for these activation instructions. Notice: due to a greater that expected demand it may take a few days for your account request to be processed.”

The larger question is why Symantec is dabbling on the turf of so many companies–Google, EMC’s Mozy, Citrix, Zoho and many others. The short answer is that Symantec may not have a choice. As software moves to the cloud and becomes a service Symantec has to play ball. Symantec has already stepped up its software as a service game.

And of course there’s also the classic cross selling opportunities. GoEverywhere’s beta is targeted at small businesses and individuals. These folks are also natural buyers for Symantec’s security suites.

Also see: Gallery: Symantec’s GoEverywhere

Whether customers bite remains to be seen, but there is something to be said for a service that aggregates other Web suites–and all the passwords that come with them.

In a nutshell, just GoEverywhere’s single sign-on approach may be worth the price of admission.

I haven’t had the chance to review GoEverywhere, but Ryan Naraine has played with it a bit.

Here are some screenshots:

Read the rest of this entry »

December 10th, 2008

HP to offer SUSE desktop Linux to business, education customers

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 7:02 am

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, Hewlett-Packard, Linux, Novell, Open Source, Symantec

Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Desktop Linux, SuSE, Linux, Desktops, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Hardware, Larry Dignan

Hewlett-Packard is giving desktop Linux a little lift by introducing it to small business customers. The company said Wednesday that it’ll offer Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop to business and education customers.

SUSE’s desktop software will be carried on the HP Compaq dc5850 (right). The desktop will be available Dec. 15 for $519. Dell offers Ubuntu on select systems.

In a statement, HP said it will offer SUSE’s desktop Linux with “a tightly integrated suite of essential applications, including OpenOffice.org, web browser, multimedia tools, and email, collaboration and instant messaging software.” In other words, HP’s desktop Linux offering will carry about the same stuff as my Dell netbook.

On the education front, HP said it’s working with Novell to develop and maintain 40 learning applications.

HP also announced that it will expand its virtualized browsing software. Here’s how HP described the software:

The first-of-its-kind Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solution was developed with Symantec and Mozilla for HP customers. The solution uses the standard release of Mozilla Firefox with a Symantec Software Virtualization Solution layer that allows customers to use the Internet productively while keeping business PCs stable and easier to support.

As customers surf the web, changes made to the PC are contained in a “virtual layer,” separate from the operating system, and do not permanently alter the machine. Customers can therefore reset the browser as needed, instantly returning the PC to its last-known good state.

The software was initially offered on the HP Compaq dc7900 business desktop, but now will be expanded to other models.

December 8th, 2008

Archiving, data recovery sparks storage market growth.

Posted by Sam Diaz @ 6:55 am

Categories: EMC, Enterprise 2.0, General, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Storage, Symantec

Tags: Data Recovery, Storage Management, Archiving, Storage, Business Intelligence, Hardware, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Sam Diaz

The thing to remember about all of the archiving and data protections that’s exponentially increased as businesses have gone digital is that it creates a very nice business for companies in the storage management game. According to today’s release of IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the storage software market in the third quarter of 2008 saw revenues of $3.1 billion, an 11 percent jump over the same quarter a year ago.

EMC led the pack with nearly 25 percent revenue share while Symantec finished second with nearly 18 percent. IBM followed, as did NetApp, HP and CA. The report said the growth was down slightly compared against the second quarter partially because of the overall economy. Said James Baker, research manager of Storage Software for IDC:

Archiving, File Systems, Data Protection and Recovery, and Storage Management showed the best year-over-year performance. Archiving growth can be attributed to widespread compliance and active archiving projects. File Systems are showing strength as virtualization spreads to the storage arena. Data Protection and Recovery is growing because users are aware of dire consequences to the firm if their data is not available when it is needed. And Storage Management is moving ahead as more data is put under management and improved storage efficiencies are being achieved with thin provisioning and as various Green IT projects come on line.

November 24th, 2008

Ho, Ho, Ho: Credit Card Fraud Not A Holiday Killer. Unless You Get Hit.

Posted by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld @ 1:58 pm

Categories: Credit crisis, E-commerce, Economy, General, News to know, Security, Symantec

Tags: Bank, Symantec Corp., Credit Card, Fraud, Sales Strategy, Sales Channel, Financial Services, Sales, Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

A recession is when your neighbor gets laid off. A depression is when you get terminated. With credit cards, fraud is not a big deal. Unless it’s your number that’s for sale, online.

A Symantec report says the underground economy is booming. The total value of goods and services was “more than” $276 million. The most popular stuff: Bank account credentials and credit cards that have CVV2 security codes with them.

But bank account credentials can be had for as little as $10. Credit cards with security codes? As little as 10 cents, up to $25 each.

What does the thief get?

Symantec figures the average balance per credit card at $4,000, yielding a potential spend of $5.3 billion. Average bank account? $40,000, yielding a potential spend of $1.7 billion.

All told, about $7 billion of money to spend. If you’re willing to go underground and get it.

That’s not chump change — if the sellers can get buyers to cough up the $276 million to buy $7 billion of purchasing “power.”

But it’s not a holiday killer. Online merchants are likely to pull in $32 billion of sales this Christmas, Hannukah and general gift-giving season, according to eMarketer. And Nielsen, at least as of October 9, was still predicting in-store sales this holiday season to rise 4.7% to $98 billion. Unit sales may be flat, but dollar sales will be up, the research firm said.

So even if every one of the 1.3 million credit cards and 42,500 bank accounts at risk, by interpolating Symantec’s numbers, are purchased and exploited to the full, that would only pump up the holiday season another 5%.

Until the sales got reversed by complaining card and account holders and start to wipe out merchants’ earnings.

November 17th, 2008

Symantec names Salem new CEO

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 1:21 pm

Categories: General, Security, Software Infrastructure, Symantec

Tags: Symantec Corp., Security, Larry Dignan

Symantec has named Enrique Salem, currently chief operating officer, as its new CEO effective April 4.

Salem will replace current chairman and CEO John Thompson, who will retire at the end of Symantec’s fiscal year. Thompson will remain chairman as Salem takes over.

Under Thompson’s leadership Symantec has broadened from being a consumer security software company to be a leading storage and enterprise security leader. The company made the announcement in a statement.

Salem (right) was named Symantec’s operating chief in January 2008. Before that, Salem led the company’s security products and consumer business as well as sales and marketing. Salem was brought back to Symantec in 2004 after the security giant acquired Brightmail, where Salem was CEO. Salem originally joined Symantec in 1990 when the company acquired Peter Norton Computing–hence the Norton brand name. In between his Symantec stints, Salem had stopovers as an executive at Oblix and Ask Jeeves.

October 29th, 2008

Symantec cuts outlook amid 'pause' in IT spending

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 2:20 pm

Categories: General, Security, Software Infrastructure, Symantec

Tags: Revenue, Symantec Corp., IT-spending, Operational Accounting, Security, Finance, Larry Dignan

Symantec sees tough sledding ahead as the company cut its fiscal third quarter outlook. “Like many other companies we saw a pause in IT spending the last week of the quarter,” said CEO John Thompson on a conference call.

The security software vendor said Wednesday that its third quarter earnings (statement, all resources) would be about 11 cents a share to 14 cents a share, or 30 cents a share to 33 cents a share excluding charges. Revenue for the quarter ending Jan. 2 will be $1.45 billion to $1.5 billion. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 36 cents a share on revenue of $1.61 billion.

Thompson noted that the “strengthening of the dollar also hurt our results.” However, Symantec executives said that the company is well positioned to grab more customer wallet share as vendor relationships are consolidated. Even so, Thompson said that customers are taking longer to decide on deals and consumer spending may be weak. When asked if Symantec was being too conservative, executives said it only makes sense to cut the outlook.

Also see: Tech giants may face dollar daze

Symantec’s outlook overshadowed a strong second quarter. The company reported net income of $140 million, or 16 cents a share, for the second quarter ending Oct. 3. Excluding charges, the company reported earnings of 37 cents a share, two pennies better than estimates.

Revenue in the second quarter was up 7 percent from a year ago to $1.52 billion.

By the numbers:

• International revenue was 50 percent of Symantec’s revenue in the second quarter.
• As for Symantec’s total revenue, Europe, Middle East and Africa revenue was 32 percent of sales. Asia Pacific/Japan revenue was 14 percent of the total with the Americas (including U.S., Latin America and Canada) accounting for 54 percent.
• Storage and server management accounted for 38 percent of revenue with the consumer business representing 29 percent. Security and compliance was 26 percent of the total with services accounting for 7 percent.
• Symantec signed 326 agreements compared to 302 a year ago. Of those deals, 77 topped $1 million.

October 8th, 2008

Symantec buys MessageLabs for $695 million; Bolsters SaaS lineup

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 6:56 am

Categories: General, SaaS, Security, Software Infrastructure, Symantec

Tags: Software-as-a-service, Symantec Corp., MessageLabs Ltd., Software As A Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Security, Emerging Technologies, Larry Dignan

Somebody is finding some values out there in techland. Symantec on Wednesday said it is acquiring MessageLabs for $695 million in cash.

MessageLabs, which offers messaging and Web security services, had about $145 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending July 31.

Symantec said that the final price will depend on currency fluctuations–it is paying pounds for MessageLabs–but the bigger theme here is that the security software giant is grabbing some turf in the software as a service market.

In a statement (Techmeme) Symantec said its plan was the following:

• Use MessageLabs to bolster its online messaging security services;
• Cross-sell and up sell its SaaS-based storage and online remote access products to MessageLabs customers;
• Use MessageLabs to position the company as a SaaS player;
• And more importantly be able to offer a SaaS lineup as customers worry about IT spending.

On a conference call with analysts, Symantec CEO John Thomspson said:

This transaction immediately leverages our respective core competitive strengths. It will extend Symantec’s software expertise in data loss prevention, compliance, archiving and endpoint security solutions when combined with MessageLabs’s online expertise in email, web security and instant messaging. The combination will create what we believe will be the most comprehensive SaaS offerings with a simplified user experience that packages billing, support and application management through one easy-to-use portal. Increasingly, our customers want choice. The opportunity to provide them an expanded set of on-premise and off-premise solutions for many of their most critical information management challenges is truly exciting.

Simply put, MessageLabs is a nice hedge to Symantec’s core business of selling you suites of security apps. Symantec said MessageLabs will give it a strong portfolio of SaaS offerings and cloud infrastructure services. If the cloud ever replaces the shrink-wrap Symantec will be in position.

July 31st, 2008

Symantec is commanding more of your IT budget

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 4:50 am

Categories: General, Security, Software Infrastructure, Storage, Symantec

Tags: IT Budget, Symantec Corp., Information Technology, Storage, Norton 360, Security, Larry Dignan

Symantec’s strategy of selling security and storage together is apparently paying off as companies consolidate the number of vendors they use.

The security and storage management software company reported strong fiscal first quarter results (statement) as net income more than doubled from a year ago. Symantec reported first quarter earnings of $187 million, or 22 cents a share, compared to $95 million, or 10 cents share a year ago. Excluding charges, Symantec reported earnings of $342 million, or 40 cents a share, well ahead of Wall Street projections of 35 cents a share. Revenue was $1.65 billion, up 16 percent from a year ago.

Symantec also upped its outlook for the second quarter and projected revenue between $1.52 billion and $1.56 billion and earnings between 15 cents a share and 17 cents a share. Excluding charges Symantec sees earnings between 34 cents a share and 36 cents a share.

Under the surface it appears that Symantec is winning more wallet share. Symantec had 336 agreements worldwide versus 249 in the same period a year ago with a contract value of more than $300,000 each. Of the 336 agreements, 85 had a value of more than $1 million compared to 48 a year ago. And 80 percent of those transactions included multiple products.

Meanwhile, Symantec is weathering economic uncertainty well. On the company’s conference call, CEO John Thompson said:

The June quarter results highlight the critical nature of our product portfolio to customers around the world. In addition we saw CIOs of large enterprises purchase more products from Symantec as they strive to reduce the number of vendors they much manage. This is a trend we expect to continue particularly during these more challenging economic times…

I think its fair to say that there are a number of customers out there that are cautious in their view of what their spending plans are for the second half of this calendar year and so we can’t be unmindful of that but by the same token we happen to have key product portfolio items in security and storage management which are almost un-deferrable expenditures for them as their data volumes continue to grow. So as data volumes grow so will our business independent of perhaps the broader macroeconomic environment. While we’re not immune we think we do have some degree of insulation from that problem.

Thompson added that the pipeline for September also looks strong. Could it be that Symantec’s security and storage strategy is working? Symantec had bought Veritas to enter the storage software market but the results of the combination have been spotty over the quarters. Now Symantec is in storage, security and virtualization via the purchase of Altiris.

“I also think you’re starting to see a little bit more of products that are not just either storage or security but the combination of the two,” said Enrique Salem.

To Symantec all of these ventures flow together to manage and secure data:

Let me put our strategic intent around virtualization in context for you today. At the endpoint our strategy is based on freeing valuable information from the underlying systems functions. Today important enterprise information is scattered across a broad range of devices from PDAs to storage arrays. This valuable information is deeply entangled with other data such as operating systems and application code, which is far less valuable to any enterprise.

We believe that virtualization when properly applied can decouple information that matters from the rest of IT environment so that it can be independently secured and managed. To help our customers achieve this benefit Symantec is infusing virtualization capabilities across our portfolio from server management and high availability to security.

If CIOs are really consolidating vendors and gravitating to the big vendors Symantec could be in a good position to leverage its storage and security beachhead.

Other odds and ends worth noting:

• Symantec’s Vontu team had its best quarter ever and closed its largest data loss prevention deals ever.
• Norton 360 represents more than 35 percent of the company’s consumer sales.
• Storage and server management software was 37 percent of Symantec’s revenue as sales jumped 12 percent from a year ago with the consumer business accounting for 29 percent of the total (up 12 percent. Security and compliance software was 27 percent of Symantec’s revenue total with services coming in at 7 percent.
• Fifty two percent of revenue was international.

December 3rd, 2007

Technology's natural state: Duopoly (or close to it)

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 7:35 am

Categories: AMD, Adobe, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, General, Google, Hardware Infrastructure, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mobile, MySpace, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, Software Infrastructure, Symantec, Telecommunications, VMware, Verizon, Yahoo

Tags: Duopoly, VMware Inc., Western Digital Corp., Microsoft Corp., Technology, Intel Corp., IBM Corp., Microsoft Windows, Linux, Virtualization

The merger of Activision and Vivendi to create a video game juggernaut on par with Electronic Arts was the big news over the weekend, but from a high level it’s more of the same: Another tech sector and another duopoly in training.

The Activision-Vivendi deal, announced Sunday, is being analyzed for its impact on the gaming market (Guitar Hero meets World of Warcraft) and the financial mumbo jumbo (it’s complicated). See the statement and Techmeme.

Video games aren’t ZDNet’s bailiwick, but we do know about duopolies. And technology increasingly seems to be headed toward duopoly-ville.

Let’s go around the horn and look at the major technology sectors. But first a few disclaimers:

• Where there isn’t a secure duopoly I take an educated leap and make a projection.
• The market is U.S. for my purposes.
• I don’t claim to cover every market.
• I apologize in advance for excluding companies that didn’t make the cut. I also apologize in advance for not taking your PR calls as you try and make the case that you matter.

Now on to our duopoly tour:

First stop is hardware…

PCs: Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Yes, we know there is Acer and perhaps Asia’s juggernaut buys Dell as the dollar falls to peso territory. But for now the U.S. PC market is ruled by HP and Dell.

Networking: Cisco and Juniper. Lucent? Nortel? Spare me. For the stuff you need to really run your next generation network you wind up going to Cisco and Juniper. This is a bit of a projection given there are more players, but if I were to place a bet today the duopoly would be Cisco and Juniper.

Hard drives: Seagate and Western Digital. The consolidation along these lines has already taken place in many respects. Seagate acquired Maxtor. Western Digital has gobbled up Komag.

Semiconductors: Intel and AMD. Intel has been on a tear so it’s clearly the lead dog. But AMD is a perfect pain in Intel’s rear end. And therefore AMD will always have customers.

To the right there’s the software enclave…

Operating systems (enterprise): Windows and Linux. A no brainer duopoly as Linux usurps Unix in the enterprise. The big question is what will be the split between Windows and Linux. My guess: It’ll be 50-50 in a few years. After that the gains will diminish for Linux. As for the consumer market, duopoly discussions are futile. There’s Windows and there’s Apple’s OS X. The latter is gaining share and picking up as Apple expands, but we’re no where near duopoly chatter.

Enterprise software: SAP and Oracle. Sure, HP and IBM are rapidly beefing up their software units. But once that dance of music chairs ends a mid-level software company can take comfort (or not) in the belief that it’ll be a subsidiary of Oracle someday.

Software as a service: Salesforce.com and ?. The question mark is a pure hedge at this point, but the SaaS market is fluid. Some folks would say it’s Salesforce and NetSuite today. However, looking out behind a year could find Salesforce.com and SAP in a duopoly. How’s that for a projection? Or Oracle buys Salesforce.com and NetSuite and we wind up with the same situation in enterprise software.

Security software: Symantec and Cisco. One side of this equation (Symantec) is secure. The other side is pretty murky. IBM has been acquiring security firms. EMC bought RSA. In the end, security will be part of a larger software package. Since Cisco is the OS for the network I reckon the networking giant will become a massive security player. You could also make a similar argument about Microsoft. Wild-card: Check Point Software, which is going to be a takeover target at some point.

Virtualization: VMware and Citrix. VMware is clearly the big dog in the virtualization market. The question: Who’s going to ride shotgun? Given that Microsoft is entering the virtualization market the software giant would be a natural pick. But let’s reserve judgment. Citrix, which recently bought Xensource, has a nice set of products that could put virtualization in more corners of the enterprise.

And to the left there’s that trendy neighborhood we call the Internet…

Search: Google and Microsoft. What!?! Is Dignan nuts? Stupid? (Actually it’s all of the above but I digress). When all the dealing is done there will be two search players: Google and Microsoft. What about Yahoo? Over time, it won’t focus as heavily on search. The search game is a marathon not a sprint and Microsoft is one of the few companies to spend heavily only to try and catch Google. Besides, we all know Microsoft will buy Yahoo at some point.

Browsers: Microsoft and Firefox. Sorry, Opera fans but the browser market has largely solidified. That could change, but it’s hard to compete with browsers that are distributed with Windows (Microsoft) and bankrolled by Google (Firefox). All that’s left to be decided is the bickering over security.

Social media: MySpace and Facebook. Yes, there are other social media players, but the duopoly–and the haters that come with them–has already arrived. The wild card: Facebook could fall from its perch if it keeps its current PR practices going.

Rich Internet Applications: Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe clearly has the platform to be declared half of an eventual duopoly. I reckon Microsoft will be a fast closer–not anytime soon though–based on its established developer relationships.

Ahead we have wireless ville…

Carriers: AT&T and Verizon Wireless. There are other carriers–Sprint and T-Mobile–that may be trendier, but based on sheer girth it’s a two-horse town.

Mobile operating systems: Microsoft and Symbian. Microsoft Windows is clearly a big mobile OS player and it’s too early to see how Google’s Android plan works out. However, Symbian has quietly become a dominant U.S. player. Google won’t usurp that lead overnight. Research in Motion could have some mojo down the road.

That concludes are tour for today.

There are other categories worth expanding on–productivity software (Microsoft and a Web-based field as long as my arm), enterprise 2.0 applications, storage and data centers–but those markets are too fluid right now to make any definitive calls.

One thing is certain though. Those markets are likely to be duopolies at some juncture in the future.

July 30th, 2007

Symantec CEO John Thompson on Microsoft, Google and Switzerland

Posted by Dan Farber @ 5:10 pm

Categories: General, IT Management, SaaS, Security, Software Infrastructure, Storage, Symantec

Tags: Security, Google Inc., Software-as-a-service, Symantec Corp., Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Corp., Dan Farber

Symantec CEO John Thomspon drinks deeply from the Microsoft well. In fact, three-quarters of his company’s $5.2 billion in revenue last year was derived from the Windows platform. But Symantec’s relationship with Microsoft is complex and at times contentious. Thompson describes Microsoft as a partner, ally and competitor.

On the competitor front, he has not been shy about criticizing Microsoft’s effort to move into the security space.

Regarding Windows Vista, Thompson has said:

Consumers should not be confused. Vista is not a security solution. Vista is an operating system, and Vista provides some very important advances from Microsoft’s perspective and for the industry’s point of view on building a more stable, more reliable, more secure operating platform, but people still need the efficacy that comes with the products that Symantec and others in the industry build, and so we should not be confused by the marketing rhetoric with what Vista is. It’s a hopefully much better product than XP or any of its predecessors, but it’s not a security solution.

Microsoft has a consumer security offering, Windows Live OneCare, but Thompson dismissed it as a worthy competitor. Like Symantec’s Norton 360 product, OneCare includes antivirus, antispyware, antiphishing, firewall, performance tune-up and backup and restore capabilities.

“What Microsoft is doing in the security space has been more hype than hurt,” Thompson said during interview with a few members of the press today at Symantec’s Cupertino, CA headquarters. “Microsoft’s presence in the consumer marketplace has been resoundingly heralded as a non-event by most in the industry. It’s not proven if customers will accept it.” Read the rest of this entry »

July 30th, 2007

Symantec slowly mining the 'dark vision'

Posted by Dan Farber @ 11:52 am

Categories: General, Security, Symantec

Tags: Symantec Corp., Credit Card, Dan Farber

Symantec is working on Dark Vision, an application for visualizing and tracking the underground economy that trades in personal data, such as credit card and social security numbers. “We are looking into their clubhouse,” said Mark Bregman, CTO of Symantec. “It’s the ’safe spot’ where they exchange illegally gotten information.”

The company first talked about Dark Vision in September 2006, but it is still in pre-alpha stage, according to Oliver Friedrichs, director of emerging technologies in Symantec Security Response.

The mashup currently drills down into five to ten servers daily where criminals are exchanging information via IRC on stolen data. About half of the activity tracked, and shown in a Google Map mashup, is in the U.S. Unfortunately, the identity thieves constantly move to different servers in this cat and mouse game,making it difficult to get a comprehensive view into the underground economy.

A message captured by Dark Vision showed included name, birthday, credit card, social security number, home address (Dark Vision truncates credit card and SSI number in the display). Another message read, “Selling hacked cpanels, payment only e-gold, I verify first.”

The messages are teasers and then they try to sell entire database, such as from a breached database or lost or stolen laptop” Friedrichs said. A complete identity can be acquired for $14 to $18 on average.

Symantec hasn’t decided what to do with Dark Vision, and given the slow development cycle it doesn’t appear to be a high priority.

Friedrichs emphasized the Dark Vision is a research project. Getting enough data to make the service reputable isn’t a sure thing, he said. Legal issues are also a problem in productizing Dark Vision, “It’s like spyware five years ago. The technology is ahead of policy and regulation. It’s an area where we need to innovate but the law has yet to catch up in these areas,” Friedrichs said.

Law enforcement agencies might also be developing similar tracking applications. Symantec makes its massive database of Internet activity available to law enforcement . “We found that law enforcement is mostly reactive. We make it available to agencies when they ask to mine our data sets,” Bregman said.

It could become a part of Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network, said Greg Hughes, group president of Symantec Global Services. “It allows analysts to see patterns, to get a better understanding of what is going on.

It would be great as a free service to affected parties, but more likely the information service would be sold to financial institutions and consumers; for example, banks could be notified if one of their credit cards has been compromised, and the bank in turn could alert credit card holders.

May 24th, 2007

On the campaign trail with McAfee's Dave DeWalt

Posted by Dan Farber @ 11:59 am

Categories: EMC, General, Mobile, Security, Software Infrastructure, Symantec, Web Technology

Tags: McAfee Inc., Security, Symantec Corp., Financial, VERITAS Software Corp., Documentum, Dan Farber

Fifty days into the job, McAfee’s CEO Dave DeWalt is pumped up about his new position and is on a campaign to change public perceptions about the company. The former CEO of Documentum and then EMC’s President of Customer Operations and Content Management Software (which acquired Documentum), told me that the company has solid assets but the brand has been neglected too long. “We have to educate the marketplace on what we have and outline our vision and strategy–many think of us as the AV [anti-virus] company,” he said.

DeWalt took over a McAfee that had been rocked by financial scandal. Despite the management and legal problems, DeWalt said the company had 16 percent year over year revenue growth, and nine consecutive record quarters. Revenues for last year were about $1.2 billion. DeWalt’s early efforts are apparently having a favorable effect on McAfee’s stock; since he joined the company on April 2, the market cap of the company has risen about $800 million.

Now the company has spent $50 million on rehabilitating its infrastructure , with a new SAP, Siebel and supply chain system and bringing in a new management team, DeWalt said. The company is also closing in on a financial restatement that will finally resolve issues with the federal regulators. “All the cards are face up, and we have world class compliance–in the top 1 percent in my opinion,” DeWalt said.

McAfee’s new mission is to be the leader in security risk management, which DeWalt defined as as combination of network and systems security. “It takes both to be a leader,” he said. His challenge is to build up the enterprise portion of the business, which is not as strong the consumer side. At Interop, McAfee made several new product announcements for enterprise-class products, including an intrusion prevention system appliance for 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks.

He views Symantec as his main competitor, but hampered by its acquisition of Veritas. “Symantec is confused about what it wants to be with Veritas. It’s like trying to make apples and oranges into the same fruit,” he said. “We don’t need to do a Veritas–security and storage are a very different selling process. That’s why Symantec has struggled so hard.” That sounds like a bit of spin control from DeWalt. Read the rest of this entry »

May 3rd, 2007

Symantec: SaaS efforts revving

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 7:08 am

Categories: General, SaaS, Security, Software Infrastructure, Storage, Symantec

Tags: Software, Software-as-a-service, Symantec Corp., Larry Dignan

Symantec said its software as a service (SaaS) product will go live later this year.

Symantec CEO John Thompson said on the company's fiscal fourth quarter earnings conference call that its Symantec Protection Network, its first SaaS offering, is on track and the company will also launch more services.

"We are happy with the launch of our beta of the Symantec Protection Network, our first software as a service offering. The Protection Network is a SaaS platform designed to deliver easy-to-use security and availability offerings to small and mid sized companies. The online backup service will enable cost-effective, reliable backup and restoration of business critical data from the convenience of a web browser.

We expect this new service go live later this year and you should expect to see us announce additional SaaS offerings throughout FY2008."

In April Symantec announced the launch of its SaaS effort, which is aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. However, Symantec has to walk a few lines with its SaaS efforts. Symantec has taken pains to allay fears that the SaaS products will sap the profits of its channel partners. In addition, Symantec also relies on shrink-wrapped software for the bulk of its business.

The transition will be notable to watch. Among other details from Symantec's earnings release:

Symantec's results topped estimates in its fourth quarter, but aside from a few upgrades Thursday analysts were generally skeptical about the company's prospects. The company reported earnings of $227 million, or 24 cents a share, excluding items. Net income was $61 million, or 7 cents a share. Analysts were looking for earnings of 20 cents a share, according to Thomson Financial. Revenue was up 5 percent to $1.36 billion. The fiscal 2008 outlook was also better than expectations.

The reaction: "This is similar to what we observed to have happened for the June 2006 quarter, when Symantec exceeded very low expectations, only to miss two quarters after expectations were then set modestly higher.  It also appears to us that Symantec is attempting to replicate this strategy of setting very low expectations for the next two quarters," wrote Bear Stearns analyst John DiFucci in a research note.

Other analysts were also concerned about Symantec's ability to execute.

Symantec has fixed its ERP woes. A quarter ago, Symantec stumbled partially because of an ERP implementation. Thompson said:

"I think we are beyond the critical stage where we are making continuous improvements in the systems environment. Clearly we saw improvements in the administrative processes around our services business, that is reflected in the March quarter results. Our licensing portal, which was one of the challenging areas, we have had a subsequent release of software to improve that. There is yet another one coming. As I said in my stated comments, we are in a process now of continuous improvement, because we think we have the right foundational architecture and products in place to support a business that wants the scale."

The company will announce a security release dubbed Hamlet in June at its Symantec's Vision conference. Hamlet aims to combine technologies from various acquisitions. In a nutshell, Hamlet combines technology components from Symantec's anti-virus, anti-spam, firewall, zero day protection and network access compliance efforts into a suite.

Thompson said:

"We are going to extend the beta testing for Hamlet to make sure we get it right, with more than 50-70 million desktops using our products around the world, I am more concerned about getting it right as we did with Norton 360 than rushing it into the marketplace. We’ll talk to you more about the release details at the June conference."

February 16th, 2007

Quote of the week: Symantec CEO John Thompson

Posted by Dan Farber @ 2:47 pm

Categories: General, Microsoft, Security, Symantec

Tags:

In an interview with news.com's Joris Evers, Symantec CEO John Thompson was asked if he subscribed to the Microsoft's notion that buying Vista makes you much safer online than with XP:

Consumers should not be confused. Vista is not a security solution. Vista is an operating system, and Vista provides some very important advances from Microsoft's perspective and for the industry's point of view on building a more stable, more reliable, more secure operating platform, but people still need the efficacy that comes with the products that Symantec and others in the industry build, and so we should not be confused by the marketing rhetoric with what Vista is. It's a hopefully much better product than XP or any of its predecessors, but it's not a security solution.

Thompson is right that Vista is not a security solution, but it is an improvement over XP on the security front. For obvious reasons, he is not a big fan of Microsoft's security products. Microsoft shipping security products, such anti-virus software, is like company being its own auditor, Thompson recently said.

He believes that Microsoft has a conflict of interest, and that a company who makes the underlying operating system platform shouldn't be the one securing it–especially with products and services that compete with those from Symantec and its competitors. It's not going to be a winning argument. The conflict of interest logic is lost on most businesses and users, who just want to be more protected or simply don't want to have to deal with nuances of security software. Symantec will have to win by creating better security solutions than Microsoft, and that battle just got tougher. At least Symantec and its competitors can be assured that the need for their products and services won't go away any time soon, if ever.

February 12th, 2007

Symantec CIO David Thompson talks ERP, security

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 6:23 am

Categories: ERP, General, Hardware Infrastructure, IT Management, Oracle, Security, Software Infrastructure, Symantec

Tags:

Enterprise resource planning implementations are never easy. In fact, it's the equivalent of corporate open heart surgery. And often there's a financial hit if things don't go well.

Symantec recently discussed a few hiccups in its ERP deployment that hurt the company's quarter. The company was combining two instances of Oracle 11i, rolling out a new product line and asking all customers to verify their license code online at the same time. The lesson: Don't do too many things at once.

To its credit, Symantec has been open about the issues, which have been resolved. ZDNet spoke with Symantec CIO David Thompson, about the lessons learned about ERP. And he has a few since Thompson had been the CIO at Oracle and PeopleSoft before coming to Symantec. Here are some of the highlights (the full interview is the podcast):

Thompson on the ERP project: When he joined Symantec he inherited a planned ERP consolidation of the systems acquired from Veritas. The good news: Both Veritas and Symantec ran on Oracle 11i. The bad news: Both systems were customized. Why? Turns out ERP systems generally don't handle software licensing well without customization. Thompson said most of the heavy lifting revolved around customizing the system to handle licensing. That fact isn't too surprising to anyone that has tried to compare various licensing agreements from software vendors–no two licensing models are the same. "We had light to moderate customization," says Thompson. "ERP is geared toward distribution."

Thompson on business processes: The ERP system went live Nov. 7, which was a few days ahead of schedule. "From an IT technology perspective we were pleased with results," says Thompson. However, business processes designed to have all customers–mainly from the Veritas side of the business–input licensing codes online caused problems. Generally, Symantec requires licensing codes to verify compliance with agreements and prevent counterfeiting.

At the same time, Symantec upgraded its licensing portal and rolled out new Net backup products. "A portion of customers were not used to having license codes. We also distributed upgrade to customer base," says Thompson. "That led to increased call volumes."

The lesson learned: "When you have a business process change don't throw out upgrade at same time," says Thompson.

Thompson on reducing risk: It wasn't like Thompson never consolidated ERP applications. He did it at both PeopleSoft and Oracle. Given that experience, he knew risk management was critical and so called "big bang" projects are a myth. As a result, Thompson broke a year-long ERP implementation project into seven phases. "My focus was to reduce risk," says Thompson.

In general, that approach meant that any part of the project that touched customers came last. The phases, which began a year ago, were:

• Upgrade infrastructure and hardware.
• Deploy trade compliance. Symantec products face regulations over where they can be sold.
• Simplify and cut SKUs from both companies internally. These were reduced from 6 million to 400,000.
• Consolidate infrastructure and create one instance of Oracle 11i.
• Launch a new portal for partners to get product information.
• Roll out new license code system and new buying programs for customers so they could purchase applications across Symantec.
• Help smaller channel partners that didn't have the IT heft to update the new Symantec SKUs. "We simplified the business, but our partners and distributors have to take new SKUs. (Smaller partners) didn't have the IT skills." The solution: Symantec deployed its staff and contractors to help. 

Thompson on returns: Symantec has cut costs on trade compliance and garnered better performance from new infrastructure and decommissioning older hardware. Other benefits were better data sharing with partners. No hard figures yet.

Thompson on services oriented architecture (SOA): Symantec sees SOA as part of the plan in the future, but it isn't ready for prime time. "It looks promising in the future, but it's not a core thing today," says Thompson. 

Thompson on security: What keeps Symantec's CIO up at night? "Staying ahead of zero day vulnerabilities," says Thompson. Symantec uses its own security software and Thompson knows the reputation hit that would ensue if the company had a big security issue. Big worries include protecting customer data and the threat of mobile devices on the corporate network. 

January 25th, 2007

Symantec sheds light on its internal IT

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 10:01 am

Categories: General, Security, Software Infrastructure, Symantec

Tags:

Give Symantec CEO John Thompson some credit for being upfront about a dreadful quarter.

Throughout Symantec's recent troubles, Thompson has been straightforward about the quarter. On Symantec's earnings conference call he also shed a lot of light on the perils of fumbling an internal technology implementation. In Symantec's case, the problems stemmed from an enterprise resource planning implementation gone awry.

We're still trying to figure out why the project stumbled and who the key players were, but Thompson did lay out the effects. In any case, there's usually plenty of blame to be passed around when these big systems rollouts stumble. More often than not, failure can be attributed to poor project management and the lack of process planning by the customer.

Here's what Thompson had to say on the earnings call:

"We consider the business process changes implemented with the systems consolidation important to scaling our business and lowering our cost over time. Systems changes such as these certainly don't come without issues and we may have had more than our fair share of them with this set of changes where we incurred higher expenses than planned and loss some revenue opportunities during the quarter.

There were several areas where we had to absorb additional labor and administrative costs. For example, we had to duplicate processing of some documents in order to complete transactions or records, as well as manually manage the SKU process for some of our partners around the globe. In addition, our enterprise support cost increased as we fielded that many more calls with longer than normal hold times.

Administrative challenges in our services business contributed to some lost revenue as we were not able to obtain the required data to support revenue for the period. Process problems affected the quality of the data which hampered our ability to recognize the revenue. However, we believe the major technical and process issues are now behind us."

Symantec better hope those technical issues are over. It has enough problems on its hands.   

January 24th, 2007

Symantec woes spur spending diet

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 1:59 pm

Categories: General, Security, Software Infrastructure, Symantec

Tags:

For Symantec, first comes the profit warning then comes the spending diet.

Symantec delivered a clunker of a fiscal third quarter and said it's going to cut $200 million in expenses.

"With a disappointing quarter behind us, we are moving to better align our costs with our new revenue expectations," said John W. Thompson, Symantec chairman and chief executive officer. "I am confident that we have the right strategy in place; however, we must sharpen our execution."

Specifically, Symantec "has identified a number of areas to achieve its target: reduce new hires; reduce contractor and consulting spending; reduce travel spending; consolidate additional facilities; and reduce the current workforce in certain business functions and geographies."

In other words, Symantec got a little bloated. On a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis, the company reported net income of $114 million, or 12 cents a share, on revenue of $1.3 billion. Non-GAAP earnings were 26 cents a share, a penny better than lowered estimates.

For the fiscal fourth quarter ending March 30, Symantec projects revenue between $1.24 billion and $1.27 billion. Earnings are projected to be between 4 cents a share and 6 cents a share. Non-GAAP earnings per share are expected to be 18 cents and 20 cents. Thomson Financial estimates call for 21 cents a share.