It played an important role in the overall industry, offering an alternative to an IPO to many high-flying startups with good technology. Under John Thompson Symantec continued to grow through acquisitions. The best evidence that this was a major blunder for Symantec is the valuation for the Veritas division when it was spun out to investors led by the Carlyle Group in 2015 for $8 billion.
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Under pressure to keep Symantec’s stock price up, Thompson continued an aggressive acquisition strategy, culminating in 2004 with the largest acquisition in the software industry for the time: the $13.5 billion purchase of Veritas, a data center software and storage company. By the following Monday morning Symantec had appointed its first CISO. He asked “Who’s our CISO?” They did not have one. Very early in his tenure, Thompson relates, Symantec suffered a breach on a Friday. Moritz defined Symantec’s acquisition strategy, which he termed the NSSSM strategy: networks, systems, storage, and security management. He passed on that investment, but was so impressed with Finjan’s CTO, Ron Moritz, that he later hired him as Symantec’s CTO. He also looked briefly at Finjan Software. He embarked on divesting the company of non-security products like the Internet Tools division and the Visual Café product line, as well as ACT! He then started acquiring security companies such as Axent Technologies, a firewall vendor, L-3 Network Security for vulnerability management, and Seagate's Network Storage Management Group. He had little experience with security products, but was tasked with growing the enterprise security business of Symantec. Thompson had a 28-year career at IBM, rising to the role of General Manager of the Americas. That acquisition gave BRM the capital to invest in Check Point Software.Įubanks stepped down from Symantec in 1999 to be replaced by John W. Symantec also acquired Fifth Generation Systems, which had a contract with a small company in Jerusalem called BRM for anti-virus software. Five years later, it acquired the AV products of both Intel and IBM. In October 1993 Symantec finally entered the AV market when it acquired Cleveland-based Certus International Corp. By 1993 Symantec even got into the contact management business when it acquired the makers of ACT!, from Contact Software International. Symantec also acquired a C++ compiler and pcANYWHERE for remote desktop management.
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Symantec went public in 1989 and its stock took off, giving it the currency to continue to acquire companies including Peter Norton’s PC software company, Norton Utilities, for $60 million in stock. In 1987 Symantec acquired tools for project management (TimeLine), presentations (Think Tank) and compilers for the Macintosh (Think C and Think Pascal), and an email system called InBox. Under its CEO at the time, Gordon Eubanks, Symantec embarked on a strategy of acquiring niche products and taking them to market. The combined company retained the Symantec name and shipped its first major product, called Q&A, in 1985. It was acquired by a smaller competitor, C&E Software in 1984. The Symantec name came from a small software company founded in 1982 by Stanford grads to create a database program for the new IBM PC. As viruses became more and more virulent, the importance of AV grew, as did the AV market. And as networks became predominant in the ’90s, viruses began to spread over the wire instead of through dirty diskettes. As PCs invaded the workplace, so did viruses. File storage, system optimization, disk cleaning, data erasure, backup and recovery, and anti-virus made up bundles sold by software companies that primarily addressed the consumer market.
The original anti-virus vendors grew from companies that provided a variety of utilities for the nascent PC industry. The 1980s were a time when viruses were transferred from machine to machine via floppy disks. Much of the following is excerpted from my recent publication, Security Yearbook 2020.Īnti-virus products predated the internet. Let’s look at Symantec’s history and it’s place in the cybersecurity industry eco-system.
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