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Symantec, Veritas Merger Approved
stuuf writes "Shareholders today voted to approve a merger between Symantec and Veritas. The deal, announced last December, was valued at $13.5 billion. However, some of Symantec's investors have backed off since then, and the merger, expected to close on July 2, is now valued at only $11 billion. Many of Symantec's products have been losing popularity recently; the merger may be good news for Veritas's competitors."
Veritas?
Will Robert Kilroy Silk be on the board?
Maby i'm just very thick... but... why would these two companies merge ? (is it a really merger btw, or really one company buying out the other?)
A large storage company, and a maker of security software? Where's the "synergy" ? Maby i'm missing a concept or two...
What will the merger offer.. "virus protected databases" ?
Someone please clue me in here....
.. that veritas backupexec doesn't end up as direly pitiful as Symantec Antivirus. That would be real shame as BE is a great product.
Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?
Sig Nature
"It's so forward-thinking and so bold, I would say in two years you will be able to evaluate if this was the right move strategically and financially," ...
It is indeed for forward-thinking, that many of us don't seem to get why these two companies should be merging. That is: it seems their fields hardly overlap at all, so I'm curious where the common strategy is.
see a Text Widget
Two failing enterprises join for a temporary stock jump before they 'disappear'. Key an eye out for insider trading by the top execs around October.
PS: M$ pwnz j00 ub3r n00bl3ts
The goal seems to just have a big enough total size, to "be counted as big player". So it really does not really matter what you buy.
The only reason I work with it is that many PHBs seem to have IBM syndrome - "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
And now we can look forward to that 'expertise' being brought to a backup solution. WHEE!
Seems like it was only yesterday that he was a second-rate chat show host and now he is merging with Symantec. Veritas
This is not the sig you are looking for...
I bet its so they can provide more uniform support and expand marketshare..
"end to end" mentality.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Symantec C++ was an amazing compiler and development environment for the Mac, DOS and Windows during the 1990s. Now it lives on as DMC++ from http://www.digitalmars.com/ .
It was one of the products from Symantec's golden age, when they provided useful services and software. I remember those days fondly: one could even be proud to say he or she was using Symantec software. These days the Symantec name has become a joke, associated with half assed "security" software that often fails miserably. How things change in a short decade!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Two companies, both extensively utilizing undocumented error codes in their products, both of whom don't make available any updates to software without a support contract. Both vendors sell you shrink-wrap with long out of date releases that are totally broken upon install without the updates.
It's a match made in heaven. Now Veritas can supply phone support via unskilled, scripted foreigners to complete the integration of the value-added services Symantec offers.
Put a fork in them, they're done.
Symantec's mainstays -- PCAnywhere & the old Norton Antivirus -- are simply being eclipsed. Dameware and remote desktop (the latter free with Windows) nullifies PCAnywhere. Dameware is a far more versatile solution than PCA and did I mention the other is free? Unless you're running a shop with Windows95 boxes there's not much need for PCA and Dameware can handle 95 too.
Enterprise AV is also being handled by better products such as TrendMicro's solution which is far more suited for the administrator than SAVCE (Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition). Trend's is far more a server/client solution providing tons of data on the nodes and good reporting for PHBs. SAV has its pluses, but fewer, and it has always suffered from incompatibility between its retail and enterprise solutions (Trend does a better job of uninstalling Symantec retail AVs than SAV itself).
Other than that, there is a myriad of other products and solutions Symantec offers from SSL to proxies to content filtering for Internet and email, etc. but all of these are arguably solved by other companies who, from my experience, do a better job anyhow. Symantec is a bloated company who buy up smaller companies that offer singular solutions and then do not much, if nothing at all, to move the products they've attained forward. To supplement they try to be an all-in-one solution provider and/or offer consulting, but that only goes so far. A savey administrator can find means and methods to solve the problems Symantec promises to resolve without tossing green stuff at such a company. Lock down root on the workstations, update patches everyday outloud and use Firefox instead of IE and you've eliminated 99.9% (heck, all) malware issues. You can solve email content filtering with linux/OSS solutions and then purchase a couple of other individual products to handle SSLVPN, IDS/IPS, etc. and you're done.
Symantec would have PHBs believe the tons of money chucked into their feeding trough is a good business decision. In the end, it is not. IMO, they have seen their better days....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
"...the merger, expected to close on July 2, is now valued at only $11 billion..."
Interesting how relative money is. Most days, $11 billion would seem like an awful lot of money to me ;)
I wonder if there has been more financial damage caused directly by viruses, or more caused indirectly by viruses - because people go and buy AV software??
Symantec's products have been losing popularity recently
I hear that. Could be because Symantec AntiVirus HAS PROBLEMS SNAGGING VIRUSES.
I just switched my company to McAfee Corporate after I found MyDoom lurking on my boss' computer even though he was running the client and had the latest patterns. His system was running very strangely, so I went to TrendMicro's online scan and it picked up all kinds of weird stuff, the biggest standout being MyDoom.
When I got my license renewal for SAV I told them to shove it and went to McAfee. The startup cost per license is higher than SAV, but the renewal is about half the cost compared to what Symantec wanted. When I deployed it at my company, it picked up some remenants of Nachi, a bunch of web scripting attacks and a few spyware apps. Another nice feature is that McAfee also uses a network driver to look for worm buffer overflow attacks and stop them before the files can even jump on your system. Overall, I'd have to say it is a much better value than what Symantec offers.
-R
That would be real shame as BE is a great product
Not really. Its a fine product if you have one server to protect. It's an adequate product if you have 10 servers to protect. With version 10 it could even be argued that its ok for a SLIGHTLY larger implementation.
But if you have any significant number of servers to protect it doesn't scale worth a damn. There are a number of far superior backup solutions out there. My preference is CommVault galaxy, but Legato, Tivoli, CA and even Veritas all make better products. It gets even worse if your servers are anything more than file servers. The oracle agent is marginally functional at best, there are no real agents for Sybase, MySQL or Informix,. There are no block level or image level backups. The support for large (that is more than single drive autoloaders) is a joke. And the biggest joke of all.. Support.. Veritas may have the single worst support organization on the planet.
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
OT I know, but you do realise that by offering people money for referrals you are breaking the ElectroGift Terms & Conditions thus giving them a reason not to give you your free electronic junk.
From section A.8b:
"Offering compensation for said referrals is not tolerated. You are required to invite friends and family to electrogift, not to request strangers in exchange for any service, product, or cash/currency of any kind."
I remember ITA havibng serious problems in Netware, that they could never fix (I always thought was due to too low bandwith between nodes).
Some of those were quite interesting... and even useful.
"Many of Symantec's products have been losing popularity recently..."
Really? Funny how their revenue doesn't show that at all.
Scottish is a race?
God you're a retard.
I hear the "Their support sucks" argument a lot, but that has not been my experience. We have 26 Netbackup systems throughout our company and they all work very well. When there are problems, (usually hardware related) the Veritas support group is always willing to work to find the problem. I have had nothing but good support from this company with Netbackup. An I have probably open abouit 25 calls with them over two years (with the problem being hardware 95% of the time, STK SUCKS!) I have used all sorts of backup products in the past, including BE (which isn't bad for 25 small srvers in my book), and NetBackup is the best. Avoid anyone who says anything good about FDR, unless you like lots calls in the middle of the night from mainframe schedulers.
Gaelic - Irish, Scottish and Manx Celtic group(source wikipedia) it is an ethnic group. .
By the extent of the US census it could be clasified as a race.
After all latino is
My experience is that Symantec managers do not know how to run a technical company. I've had so many problems with Symantec products that I no longer have any involvement with them.
Whenever I've had to call Symantec for customer service or technical support, I've found them to be extremely aggressive and abusive and also close to worthless.
In my experience, stories like this one from Slashdot yesterday are typical: Symantec's AntiVirus 10 Deployment Woes?
Actually your the retard , he was most likely referring to Kilroys comments about Black and Pakistani people.
Which are Racist
I know that on the Apple platform, Symantec was the defacto solution. However, for the last 5-6 years they completely abandoned the Mac. The last thing you want are zealots speaking against you.
Symantec is confused. The buying spree for small companies such as Riptech, @stake, and Lyric all seemed to make basic sense for a security-focused company -- however badly it's been integrated -- but the Veritas merger is an odd broadening of coverage. (Disclaimer: my company was acquired by Symantec last year, and I quit recently because I could discern no coherent strategy.)
At first blush, it seemed inspired. Working in security consulting, I spend all day talking to people about security as an integral business requirement for systems and processes, as opposed to applying security as a blanket (extra processes or un-integrated technologies) over unknown or messed-up business processes. So the idea of data management and protection being rolled up together with C-I-A requirements in products and services that average-joe can comprehend seemed all goodness.
But really? Inspiration is a tall order for John Thompson, who can't even maintain an appropriate filter between brain and mouth long enough to avoid pissing off major clients, much less describe what the new company's strategy is. That man's head is solid bone. And the rest of the exec team isn't much better. Charlie (EVP Services) is a spluttering angry midget who can't manage to talk about the new company without devolving into his "sugar-high speech" about how we'll all re-live the glory days and get rich by frightening our clients into buying more product and services. Seriously. He's done that repeatedly. And what the hell does "Security + Availability = Information Integrity" mean? (Does Integrity - Availability = Security?) Utter nonsense; a marketing word-salad. It's embarrassing, really.
Now, if the SymExecs had their collective shit together, they would do a reset and realize that from the current position they could easily become a serious MS-contender by merging with a company that has platform/productivity apps. (Think Novell/Suse or Sun.) That would give them a basic platform or two, data storage, db/management, data protection, application dev platform, secure networking, client services, independent client productivity apps, profesional services at multiple levels, etc etc. But that ain't gonna happen. Maybe that would exceed "bold" and reach "foolish" but without some boldness, Symantec is going to suffocate under its own weight. Quoth Fast Company magazine a few years ago: "Size is not a strategy."
J
I think not...(*poof*)
We use Brightmail at work (over 200,000 users) and since they were bought by Symantic they have gone right downhill. The website to report problems is unusable (even with IE running on XP) and calls to the callcenter get people who havn't even heard of Brightmail.
I'd advise any Veritas to switch ASAP to another provider before they get stuck with half supported Veritas or (almost as bad) Symantec's actual anti-virus product.
Backup Exec does in fact have an image option (it costs extra) and perfectly fine support for tape libraries, including FC-attached libraries, below the $300k silo level. There are also damn good MS SQL and Exchange agents. Microsoft's IT center uses Backup Exec for thousands of servers, so presumably it scales better than you think if you buy the correct option for that as well.
Perhaps you're thinking of just what you get for the base price? Even with all the options they sell, Backup Exec is still 1/3rd the price of CommVault, for similar functionality.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:I hope .... not really (Score:1)
I hear the "Their support sucks" argument a lot, but that has not been my experience. We have 26 Netbackup systems throughout our company and they all work very well.
Yes, but thats the point. Netbackup is not backupexec and neither is the support. NB support is based in the US and the support is pretty good. And while I would personally still use Galaxy, NB is a decent product.
OTOH BE support is based in Pakistan and is abysmally bad. Once you overcome the language issues you're stuck with poorly trained personnel who have little or no troubleshooting skills and no ability or interest in understanding your environment, and a genuine resistance to escalation no matter how well warranted, and it's still riddled with problems. Again for a small number of file servers, it's just fine, but Veritas is positioning it as enterprise backup, and it just isn't
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
I tend not to blame the coders for a certain level of bug content - you can only test so much before you're spending so much on testing that you'll never turn a reasonable profit selling the final product.
Management, however, gets to decide what constitutes 'reasonable', and in my opinion the standard for Symantec products allows too many bugs to get through. The attitudes that permit this are what I would expect to see brought to the Veritas.
Backup Exec does in fact have an image option (it costs extra)
You're right, it does. It just doesn't work worth a damn.
and perfectly fine support for tape libraries, including FC-attached libraries, below the $300k silo level.
Perhaps support wasn't the word I should have chosen.Optimization is probably a better choice. While it does support those bigger libraries too many drives are idle for too long too often. The only cure for this is tedious, and repeated job manipulation. In addition the I/E functions are marginal and have NO ability to track the locations of exported media
There are also damn good MS SQL and Exchange agents.
if you read the original post carefully you noticed that I didn't mention those because they do in fact work pretty well.
Microsoft's IT center uses Backup Exec for thousands of servers, so presumably it scales better than you think if you buy the correct option for that as well.
I'm not at all sure thats the endorsement I'd be looking for.
Perhaps you're thinking of just what you get for the base price? Even with all the options they sell, Backup Exec is still 1/3rd the price of CommVault, for similar functionality.
A third the price... sure.. similar functionality? not even close.
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
"Not really. Its a fine product if you have one server to protect. It's an adequate product if you have 10 servers to protect. With version 10 it could even be argued that its ok for a SLIGHTLY larger implementation. "
Use the right tool for the job. BE was designed for small workgroups/businesses. If you want to backup an entire enterprise, use NetBackup. It works great.
This is a marriage made in heaven!
Now, you can backup your data with backup exec BEFORE symantec's antivirus misses a big virus (cough cough spybot cough cough) that trashes your hard drive!
Genius, I tell you.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."