Symantec to Buy Veritas

jortega writes "Symantec is looking into buying Veritas for $13bn." The linked article is mostly about biz stuff. Seems like a kind of strange deal to me.

How is it strange?

[downer]

This makes Symantec a one-stop shop for all things IT enterprise/security related: anti-virus, anti-spam, data recovery, network security, etc.

Re:Huh?

[swordboy]

What's a antivirus company want with a backup company?

Microsoft is finally integrating antivirus into Windows. This leaves Symantec without a bunch of their revenue. They need to branch out.

Makes Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Microsoft buy an AV company about a year ago? I look for MS to include their own AV software built into Windows. That makes Symantec and others MS competitors and MS will crush them. Smart move by Symantec.

Office Reaction

[dJCL]

We resell Veritas on every major server we build, and when I mentioned the aquisition this morning the comment from everyone was effectivly "I guess we will need to find new backup software to sell with our servers." It wasn't even a thought, we just don't want to deal with symantec.

I agree...

nothing is what it seems or is reported to be...

[museumpeace]

from the art:
...It would be somewhat surprising to see Veritas agree to an acquisition , given that the company's CEO Gary Bloom has long said he thinks Veritas can grow at a steady pace on its own. Veritas has acquired numerous companies over the past two years, trying to build out its server software portfolio.... Gary Bloom used to work for Oracle...he was the VP that oversaw Oracle's swallowing of e-travel so he knows exactly what he is up against. [disclosure...I was one of a small handful of SW engineers who escaped with some dot.com lucre when Oracle later disgorged e-travel.]
I would look at Symantec buying Veritas as a defensive move...EMC has moved into new markets aggressively and managing the security of all that data they already store/fetch would be logical. It would also seriously crimp a growth path that Symantec could take into the same market space from its position as a security provider.
Now, who can tell me if I should sell my VRTS?

Re:Office Reaction

[Ubergrendle]

My corporation just spent 2 years divesting itself from all Symantec products. We literally finished this last quarter; we've actually removed Symanetc from all of our acquisition systems and our software vendors know to remove it from their customised catalogues.

With the announcement of this deal, the show of hands was unanimous for 'people not returning after christmas' who work on the Veritas account. ;)

Re:How is it strange?

[snorklewacker]

Because everything *except* the data backup are traditional "security" roles. Backup is needed, and recognized by security folks as good, but backup isn't traditionally considered a "security" product.

Backup is necessary for data integrity, and data integrity is necessary for security. Sounds pretty straightforward to me.

So, to the market (and to many outsiders) this looks like Symantec trying to buy their way into a market they have no expertise in.

Symantec's very big on acquisition; if they don't already make some product in their market space, they buy someone who does. They've been in the desktop backup space for a while after buying PowerQuest (Norton Ghost), and now they're extending it to the server space with Veritas.

Are you for real?

[FreeLinux]

I know- don't bother telling me: You won't be buying my product anyway - but anything that hurts their marketshare helps ours :)

Do you really work for CA? Is CA as aware of how people feel about them? If the answer to these questions is yes, why doesn't CA do something about it? Why must CA destroy products and anger customers?

actually...

[deviator]

I think this may improve Veritas. :)

If anyone in the support industry has been watching Veritas lately, you'd know that while they offer some nice feature-rich products, said products generally don't always install out of the box and *work* properly. This has been a problem with niche OSes (i.e. Netware) for a few years and the problem is starting to creep into the Windows products (i.e. Backup Exec 9.x) as well. In fact, it reminds me of Computer Associates...

Symantec Products, regardless of what you think of them, generally work out of the box without much hassle. They are not perfect, but they're pretty feature-complete and work quite well. We use Symantec AntiVirus Corp. Edition a LOT in the field because it works and has a decent management interface--McAfee doesn't work as well, CA's eTrust doesn't have good management tools... etc. It's the _least bad_ of the products on offer (Trend Micro is pretty good too, but I still like the centralized Symantec AV Console--it's quite clean)

There aren't a lot of great feature-complete backup offerings out there (the archival storage industry has always lagged behind IMO - look at how expensive good-quality tape drives still are) thus Veritas *almost* has a monopoly on the market, especially for SMBs. As they've gotten bigger over the past few years (once they spun off from Seagate Software) the quality of their product has (I think) dropped dramatically.

I still like Symantec overall- they do a decent job considering the size of the company. They've still got some neat products. Their antivirus division is industry-leading. I can't say that about every huge software company out there... most generally start crumbling under their own weight.

So I'm optimistic...

(is it just my imagination, or can Backup Exec trace its lineage to Norton Backup?

is it:
Norton Backup -> Norton Backup Exec -> Seagate Software Backup Exec -> Veritas Backup Exec -> Symantec Backup Exec?

I could be dreaming)

Re:Huh?

[PygmySurfer]

What's a antivirus company want with a backup company?

Veritas isn't a "backup" company. They provide enterprise storage solutions. I bet Veritas File System (VxFS) and Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) provide them with much more revenue then BackupExec and NetBackup.

I wonder what sort of effect (if any) this will have on HP's recent decision to scrap the integration of Tru64 clustering and volume management into HP-UX, and license Veritas products to bundle instead.