Symantec, Veritas reach out to investors

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be concerned about (competition from) Veritas. It's a funny twist, and one we didn't expect, but it's positive, nonetheless."

Planning a future together
The companies have not announced when they would unveil a combined product plan. Bloom said Symantec would loosely couple, or package, its products with Veritas' while it works on developing more deeply integrated product offerings to make it less complex for CIOs to handle risk management and data storage regulations and security issues.

Analysts have been concerned with the challenge Symantec may face in selling combined products and services to customers. They note that an enterprise might have one person in charge of buying security software and another handling data storage decisions.

"A lot of customers we call on are the same ones that Symantec calls on. But we don't need three or four (sales representatives) to manage the relationship," Bloom said. "We'll map out who has the strongest relationship and bring in specialists in the field. In some cases, we may have two account representatives."

The CEOs dismissed speculation that Veritas had been attracted to Symantec's acquisition offer as a defensive move against Microsoft. Microsoft is working on its next version of Windows XP, Longhorn, due in 2006. But Bloom noted that Longhorn is not slated to have storage management capability until the server version is released in 2007.

Thompson pointed out that the merger is between two market leaders, rather than a strong company buying a weak one, or a large company acquiring a small one.

"We are market leaders that are coming together, and that is why this merger is so unique," Thompson said. "And perhaps that is why some people have viewed this with some trepidation."

[tginmn]

Veritas and Symantec AV

I hope that this acqusition doesn't screw up Symantec. Veritas in my opionion has marginal software and very poor customer and channel relationships. I do business with both of them and recently decided to replace their software with CommVault because of my experiences with their customer support and buggy software.

Hopefully Symantec will be able to do some dull dilligence before they have a final deal or have enough of a honeymoon to fix the products from Veritas and patch the customer relationships.