Symantec spells out the future for the analysts
Published: 04 Aug 2005 12:45 BST
Symantec set out to make its future plans very clear to everyone, including staff, customers and especially the analyst community, on Wednesday now its merger with Veritas has been completed.
There are no plans to ditch products, with the company maintaining there is "minimal" cross-over between the two businesses. And, while the company has promised to cut costs by $150m (£84.5m), it has gone on an aggressive recruiting drive around the world to find new staff, especially in areas like product development. This includes recruiting in countries like Russia and India as it seeks to hire "the best people in software".
The strategy was spelled out by Symantec's new vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Lindsey Armstrong. "There have been questions about the wisdom of the merger but if you look at the analysis this is a good fit," Armstrong said. "The overlap between us is really quite small."
Armstrong compared the merger to that between AT&T and NCR. "Two companies that complemented each other," she said.
In a swipe at the analysts who have criticised the merger, Armstrong characterised both Symantec and Veritas as "frequent acquirers" and "frequent acquirers tend to outperform the market," she said.
And Armstrong made it clear that the company was not going to rush to change things, leaving both companies to run in their own way over the next six months to a year. The consultants show "that there is a difference between a 'scope merger' like this and a 'scale merger' like HP/Compaq, she said. "On a scope deal the less you integrate the better."
And she pointed to other reasons for not rushing. "If you look at it, everybody in this company now only knows 50 percent of it", she said and it will take time for them to fully understand the right things to do.
As such, there are no plans to cut back on products and push too quickly to merge different teams. This means the company expects to hold on to its market share and grow quickly. To illustrate this, Armstrong pointed to the target of $5.1bn revenue in the coming year.
On employment, the company is bringing in another 150 staff this year across EMEA and 3,200 across the company as a whole with most of the growth in new markets. The company has no plans to change its overall strategy on pricing either . But one change will be in Symantec's product toll-out strategy. It is moving from a cycle of introducing a major upgrade on its security products every six months to a process of more frequent updates.
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