Regardless of whether you're a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty type, Symantec's future promises to be challenging. Arguably, the company's anti-virus business amounts to a license to print money, which the company exercised to the tune of $1.8 billion in 2004. On the other hand, signature-based attack detection isn't perceived to be as useful as it once was, and Microsoft is poised to enter the market. However, Symantec's business is still strong and growing, so it has the wherewithal to drive into new markets and use its lead in security to stay a step ahead, even with the Redmond mob on its tail.
To that end, the company announced its Symantec Enterprise Architecture (SEA) platform this past April and is beginning to deliver products based on that announcement now. According to Symantec, SEA will bring together network, storage, and systems management to enable a better managed--and therefore more secure--enterprise infrastructure. By integrating existing security products with newer administration tools, Symantec believes it can increase its foothold in the enterprise.
Symantec faces some monstrous challenges because this market already has some well-entrenched players. Symantec's goal is to parley its security relationship with many midsize and large companies into a broader asset management relationship. It plans to do this over the next two years by building an infrastructure management solution that takes desktop and server systems from purchase to production to retirement.
SYMANTEC'S SEMANTICS
Symantec must first deal with the fact that the industry tends to think of network, storage, and systems management differently than it does. The company still sees its business through a security lens. To Symantec, storage management means protecting data through security-driven snapshots and backup, not managing a complex storage environment such as a SAN. Systems management means provisioning and patch management, not user and application access administration, or server utilization and virtualization. Finally, network management to Symantec means network-born threat management, not managing infrastructure gear such as switches and routers.
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