Symantec sees biz expansion in new IT landscapes

PUNE, INDIA: The IT industry is witnessing several changes underlined by the emergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model coupled with newer security threats and growing concerns over protecting data loss.

Amid such changes, Symantec Corporation, the global security, storage and system management solutions provider, sees new opportunities for its business and aims higher growth.

While speaking to media here on Monday, Symantec’s president and CEO Enrique Salem said the IT industry is undergoing many changes and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is one of the important parts that the company considers key for its future business.

“For Symantec, about 15 per cent of the total revenue will be from SaaS in next five years,” Salem said at Symantec India’s Pune center. He added the company wanted to bring more and more product offerings on SaaS that brings good opportunities for business.

In fact, Symantec has acquired Softscan, the security provider using SaaS model in the Nordic region, to strengthen its SaaS business.

Salem called new mobile and smart devices like Blackberry, Android etc., as ‘consumerization of IT’, and stressed, “How IT can support this environment, brings big opportunity for us.”

According to him, the company is keen on developing applications beyond Windows platform to reach out to users of other platforms. He viewed that losing data for organization is a bad scenario compared to server crash.

As part of Symantec’s priority, Salem informed that the company’s business is to secure data of people on widest range of devices and how can people have access to that data.

About priorities, Salem stated that Symantec wanted to simplify security for users and doing so it wanted to deliver security in suites along with the offering of data backup and recovery solutions using the data de-duplication technology.

“In order to reduce cost, customers prefer heterogeneous products and so Symantec is working on building products that are platform agnostic and allows customers the freedom to select products of their choice,” Salem stressed.

Moreover, he added, Symantec is developing new technology for data protection, which will keep close track of data – who created data, who can access data and so forth.

“This next generation technology will control data loss in organizations. Because mostly people from within the organization have access to data and about 80-90 per cent of data loss in firms is done by insiders,” Salem opined.

According to Symantec’s latest ‘State of the Enterprise Security Report’, cyber attacks, such as spam emails and computer hacking, cost businesses around the world £1.2 million in 2009 alone.

Since the merger of Veritas Software with Symantec, the company plans to bring together file system management, data security, archiving and storage along with data loss prevention (DLP).

In December 2009 quarter, company announced that 37 per cent of total deals were over 1 USD million size comprised the security and storage product segment.

Recently, Symantec launched Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackUp 7 products for data management and recovery for business in India and the US. “SaaS, DLP and security suites are the three key business focus areas for Symantec,” said Salem.