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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.
Yea, but so does Microsoft and Symantec, and you dont see Microsoft buying up... oh wait...
Seriously though, two companies selling computer services to corporations does not really qualify as enough overlap, there's gotta be something more to make a merger like this work.
You're a real glass half empty guy aint ya. Maybe the Veritas dudes will take over the development of NAV and the thing will get better :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
>> Yea, but so does Microsoft and Symantec, and you dont see Microsoft buying up... oh wait...
The current rumor, according to the Veritas technician who has been helping us with the i3 product, is that IBM is looking at Symantec.
It makes more sense than Microsoft. IBM can easily brand Symantec's desktop products as a side business, but the real meat of the deal is 2 things:
1. Veritas clustering and related enterprise level stuff. Goes along with IBM's enterprise services vision, as well as affording tighter integration with IBM products, like MQ and Websphere to provide more robust and highly available solutions.
2. i3 kicks major ass as a montitoring tool for j2ee and database based applications. Apparently, tighter integration with Websphere is on their minds...which would kind of be a blow to BEA (weblogic).
I also work with guys from IBM pretty regularly, and they hear the rumors on their side as well.
The hard core, enterprise level stuff has never really been a Microsoft area of business. They see happy with just taking over the desktop, and providing small to mid-range business solutions. At least that's my take on it....
wbs.
Huh?
Here is some quality Veritas Party comedy.
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!
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.
lol. You came partway to answering you own question:
"virus protected databases"
Um, as a matter a fact, yes, corporate customer are very concerned about their data, and would like it protected..
Essentially, you need to look at it from the customer's perspective (i.e the business solution they're solving, not from the geek classification of the company). That is, symantec is interested in deploying mid to enterprise level solutions that solve the problem of how to gurantee data and systems integrity. IDS's, antivirus software, firewalls, etc, are all part of symantec's current business. Veritas provides backup solutions. That is one essential part of ensuring data integrity. So the admin can look at their IDS/Antivirus screen, notice that they've been attacked, and hit the "restore" button (this is all hypothetical, but you get the idea..) All one integrated solution... Does it make more sense now?
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 ;)
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
IBM would sort of make sense here. IBM entered a joint venture with veritas (El Reg) to bundle Veritas Cluster & Storage Foundation with their kit, in some form anyway.
...)
Veritas also has products that possibly could provide some of the missing pieces from IBMs linux solutions (VxFS, VxVM, Cluster
But Veritas & Symantec ? Doesn't make any sense to me at all.
Veritas is so 90s. Vxvm is extremely overrated with features that cannot possibly be deployed in a mission critical environment. If you stick to your regular mirrors, stripes, raids... you mind as well use the FREE Aix LVM or Solaris VM. Which I swear are simpler and better nowadays.
That's not entirely true. For example, LVM relies on volume definitions in the ODM, which in a clustered environment, can easily get out of sync on one of your servers with the definitions in the VGDA if a logical volume has been modified outside of the HACMP environment. This can cause you some major headaches when you try to fail over to your other node if the VGDA no longer agrees with ODM on your failover node. That's not a problem you have if you're using Veritas instead of LVM.
That isn't to say that LVM sucks, it doesn't, and in most cases you don't need anything else. But there are situations, particularily in clustered environments, where there are definite advantages to using Veritas over LVM.
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*)