Shaping Up

Symantec used its Vision conference earlier this month in Las Vegas to point out that the company has gotten its act together in relation to its product line. You might remember that as recently as a year ago there was a lot of "post acquisition product line anxiety," especially with the Veritas pieces. Basically the story goes something like this -- the core business groupings are Data Protection (including the Backup Exec and NetBackup pieces separated out from the storage group), Endpoint Security and Management (including Alteris), Storage Management, Information Foundation, Compliance and Security Management (IFCSM), Consumer Security (over a billion dollars in revenue) and Services. Symantec talks about its emerging growth areas meaning things like virtualization, SaaS and Cloud Computing which the company is still coloring in -- along with doing creative things like a relationship with Waway for a storage appliance initially targeting the China storage market and its acquisition of SwapDrive which is part of its consumer group's SaaS offerings. The good part was that getting their core businesses aligned puts them in a position to figure out how they can innovate off of this base. And it's always nice to see a John Thomson keynote -- he's a delight to listen to and we've yet to see him with a PowerPoint slide.