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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."
I would assume the software company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veritas_Software
From TFA:
The marriage of a security company and a storage company is a move that tells both industries that systems management and security should be managed as one, Sidders said, noting that if the Symantec-Veritas merger is successful, it may lead to other similar deals.
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
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
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.