Security Vendor Symantec 25 Facts You Should Know
1. Symantec was founded in 1982 under a National Science Foundation Grant bestowed on it to pursue the creation of artificial intelligence technology.
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2. Symantec has long been an M&A friendly company-it was first acquired by and merged with a small start-up called C&E Software in 1984.
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3. Since then, Symantec has acquired over 65 companies.
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4. Symantec’s late 1980s successes were fueled by a spate of successful developer tools such as THINK Pascal, THINK C, Symantec C++, and Visual Cafe.
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5. It wasn’t until fiscal year 1989 – the same year that it went public – that the company finally became profitable.
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6. Symantec’s momentous shift into the antivirus market occurred in 1990, when the company picked up what at the time was its largest buy: Peter Norton Computing for $70 million.
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7. At the time, AV arguably played second-fiddle to Norton’s other utilities, such as back-up, file compression and data restoration applications.
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8. Symantec’s buy of Norton gave it a 34 percent stake in what was then a $410 million utilities market.
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9. By 1992, Peter Norton Computing Group made up 75 percent of Symantec’s revenues.
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10. The late 1990s were when Symantec truly shifted its focus to the security market, starting first by divesting itself of many of its developer tools and Act! and rounded out with the 1998 acquisition of both Intel’s and IBM’s antivirus business.
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11. The bitter feud with McAfee started with a 1997 suit from Symantec claiming McAfee stole Norton code for its own security products.
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12. McAfee in turn slapped Symantec with a $1 billion defamation lawsuit.
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13. The legal matters dragged on until a hush-hush settlement was struck in 1999.
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14. That still doesn’t keep Symantec and McAfee from getting their digs in. During last year’s McAfee partner conference in Las Vegas, Symantec reportedly plastered the town with its own yellow branded advertising.
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15. Today Symantec employs over 17,500 workers in 40 countries around the globe.
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16. The company is number 419 on the Fortune 500 and brought in $6.2 billion in revenues last year.
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17. Symantec has made some key acquisitions this year: VeriSign’s security business for $1.28 B, PGP for $300 million and GuardianEdge for $70 million.
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18. The company employs more than 2,000 researchers in its security operations centers and research labs worldwide.
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19. The company has attained top market position in seven different enterprise and consumer security categories.
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20. It has also got top honors for three different storage and availability market categories.
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21. Channel partners didn’t much care for Symantec’s then-COO, now-CEO Enrique Salem’s comments in 2008 about cutting the channel out of more sales to improve its margins.
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22. The company has worked hard to mend bridges and build a more sophisticated channel program for partners over the last few years.
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23. Since last fall, Symantec has introduced a number of channel partner specializations for partners to better differentiate themselves and tighten focus on a limited number of products within Symantec’s cornucopia of offerings.
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24. Included on the list are: Archiving and Discovery, Endpoint Management, SMB, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Foundational Enterprise Security and IT Compliance.
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25. In June, Symantec also announced a new managed services license, through what it calls ExSP Licensing Program, for VARs, MSPs and service providers.