Symantec has been a very busy vendor of late. Some recent examples:

1. Definitive agreement to acquire MessageLabs—a trusted provider of managed email security services to many organisations. In fact, MessageLabs, which is based in the UK, claims to have 19,000 customers in 86 countries. Symantec will, of course, help extend MessageLab's reach into USA. More on that in upcoming research.
2. Acquisition of multiple niche virtualisation vendors—including Appstream and nSuite. As mentioned in a recent Hydrasight report, we believe Symantec is becoming increasingly positioned as a frontrunner in the ability to provide secure and operationally-efficient heterogeneous administration of enterprise endpoints—be they ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ client, mobile and/or virtualised.

This is in addition to acquisitions such as Vontu, Altiris and Veritas among many others. To put it simply, and humourously, this is not your grandparent's Symantec. It is also why, for quite some time, I've referred to them as Symantec Corp.

In 2006 Hydrasight was critical of Symantec Corp’s lack of focus on integration. At the time we noted the importance, and potential value to the ITO, of greater attention by software vendors to integrating IT management functions from three critical yet distinct perspectives. Namely, (1) user interface, (2) management data and (3) business service / process. Given this, we had previously been critical of Symantec Corp’s lack of focus to this requirement. The subsequent acquisition of Altiris therefore appears to have been a significant turning point. It has most recently resulted in a comprehensive integration strategy, based largely on Alitiris technology, which is now being built in to several Symantec endpoint suites. For those who are interested, it is called the (Symantec) Open Collaborative Architecture.

As a result of these developments, we recommend ITOs remain abreast of ongoing improvements in Symantec Corp’s capabilities—ensuring that it is not considered simply as ‘yet another anti-virus vendor’ but rather a potentially strategic vendor of IT infrastructure software.