Symantec has future acquisitions in its sights
Symantec has future acquisitions in its sights
With Veritas fitted firmly under its belt, Symantec is now planning on acquiring even more companies in its bid to improve the quality of security and storage products offered to customers and in an attempt to reduce the number of vendors in the market.
Over the past year, Symantec has spent almost a half a billion U.S. dollars buying several companies, which include Brightmail, ON Technology and SafeWeb, which sells tools to fight against spam and to secure corporate networks.Veritas has also made bought many companies over the last two years to help it move beyond storage management, including the US$59 million acquisition of Ejasent, Precise Software Solutions and Jareva Technologies.
Staff at Symantec expect to keep up the habit of buying companies too as they try to corner market in the future.
The US$13.5 billion deal makes the combined company the fourth biggest software maker in the world and it plans to deliver information security and availability solutions across all platforms, from the desktop to the data centre, from consumers and small businesses to large organisations and service providers.
John W. Thompson, the chairman and chief executive officer of Symantec, said: "Customers are looking to reduce the complexity and cost of managing their IT infrastructure and drive efficiency with fewer suppliers.
"The new Symantec will help customers balance the need to both secure their information and make it available, thus ensuring its integrity. We believe that information integrity provides the most cost-effective, responsive way to keep businesses up, running and growing in the face of system failures, Internet threats or natural disasters."
Veritas were unable to make any further comment on the acquisition at this stage.
However, Paul Albright, the SVP of marketing at Network Appliance, talked about how the merge will benefit this company: "The Symantec/Veritas merger marries data availability and security to provide a very compelling solution for data-hungry and information-driven customers.
"NetApp customers can benefit tremendously from this merger as we continue to expand our joint solution development, tighten interoperability and simplify management for existing and future Symantec and Veritas products.
"Importantly, we believe this merger validates the NetApp philosophy that 'specialists win' and represents the market reality that pure-play companies focused on their own core competences deliver superior customer value."
Related Article: