While the Brightmail acquisition is quite large, $370 million, most of Symantec's acquisitions have been smaller, aimed at "shoring up some technology areas we might have needed to boost a little bit," Cullen said.
For example, Symantec bought SafeWeb for clientless VPN technology.
Symantec is confident it can fend off competition from
Microsoft, which plans to come out with its own anti-virus products. Microsoft last year acquired anti-virus vendor GeCAD and recently re-iterated plans to come out with anti-virus products.
Symantec can compete with Microsoft by offering integrated antivirus, firewall, behavior blocking and other types of behavior monitoring, Cullen said.
Also, Microsoft's technology will likely be specific to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook; Symantec can offer protection for other mail products too, including Lotus Notes, he said.
Another focus for Symantec is to mitigate problems its customers are having with patch management. "The issue with patches is that they are always reactive, and take a long time to deploy," Cullen said.
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