Last week the Trusted Advisors visited Symantec at their Mountain View Headquarters in California.
It was an important meeting for the TAs. Symantec has for half a decade been stumbling through a succession of CEOs at a rate atypical of a fortune 500 company. A CEO tenure, on average, is somewhere in the region of 8-10 years. Symantec though has seen 3 take the helm since 2010.
This CEO turbulence from a customer standpoint has felt like it had eroded Symantec’s vision and strategy. It has left its mark on the business psyche as well as impacting those more solid metrics like market position, revenue and share price.
The CEO appointed last year, Michael Brown, is tackling the damage suffered by this CEO throughput in a surprising way. Rather than acquire a new company (which seriously would not have been a surprise), he announced last October that Symantec would split into two companies -Veritas and Symantec. Veritas would focus on storage, leaving Symantec to refocus its energy on its security business. This demerger aims to free the storage and security divisions within Symantec so that they can pursue their own paths. No more will these divisions have to align to a common goal. As separate entities, they should be faster to respond to market changes, thereby allowing each to regain lost market share.
Before the TA meeting, the biggest question on my mind was 'will this strategy work?' After a few days looking at the changes Symantec could introduce as a result of the demerger, I am now one customer who believes it might.
You see I want to see a smaller, more agile Symantec. I want to see it develop its products and shake off the tagline "Symantec -where good products go to die". To do this it needed a smaller, more intelligently honed product portfolio. And it needs to convince customers that it was serious about developing them.
And it is in this area of product development that I got my biggest surprise. Symantec has on its payroll over 4000 developers. As an Altiris ITMS customer, I'd heard from Product Management several times over the last two years that Symantec was taking product development seriously again, but I'd never been exposed to the scale of it. I found this figure both staggering and heartening.
So come October, when this demerger becomes reality, I'll be heaving a huge sigh of relief and will be looking forward to Symantec's brighter, and more customer focused, future. And I think, with hindsight, that this change is well overdue.