Symantec's business model

Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software with the mission of “enabling customers to have confidence in their connected experiences”. Symantec software helps people to protect their infrastructure and their information by delivering software and services that handle risks to information security, availability, compliance, and IT system performance. The offer is delivered to customers, enterprises and also governments. (Partners are more than 50,000 worldwide) There are more than 50,000 partners worldwide and privileged relationships are also with several OEMs and ISPs, retailers and online stores. The company operates in 2 growing and diversified markets: the security market and the storage software market. After the acquisition of Veritas in July 2005, Symantec also became the leader supplier of storage software. This new segment consists of storage management, server and application management, backup and archiving, and infrastructure software product and services.
A sustainable growth is pursued mainly by:
• Research and development. That includes enhancing existing products, responding to changing customer requirements, and developing and introducing new products. The company is organized by separate product development teams, each of which held responsibility for design, development, documentation and quality assurance. The product development teams work with the support of the marketing teams that is always looking for new opportunities. Symantec Research Labs (SRL) is a team designed to develop new technologies and products. The company has 9 R&D centers in the U.S. and other two in Tokyo and Beijing. The Symantec Security Response Team is responsible for collecting and analyzing the latest malware threats and vulnerability. The reactiveness of this team in discovering zero-day threats determines the company brand equity and trustworthiness. In the 2008 the R&D expenses were $895.2Mn (15% of the total revenues), an increasing of 3% respect to 2007.
• Acquisitions. The company made totally 56 acquisitions during its history. The factors driving the decision are: acquiring a particular technology, group of people, products, increase the time to market and the market share. Although sometimes there can be overlaps in the technology acquired (see with PC Tools), a deal was always worthwhile when there are complementary products than can broaden the Symantec products portfolio or when the target company has a presence in emerging markets.