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Leader: What Symantec-Veritas deal tells us
In Veritas vino - but a positive development more widely?

By silicon.com

Published: Thursday 16 December 2004

Much has already been said about the Symantec-Veritas marriage given that it has been telegraphed over the past week. But it is not only its size - $13.5bn - or the expectation of a wave of further software vendor mergers that is of note here.

Symantec has been expanding its reach for some time but with Veritas - speciality: storage management software - its range becomes much wider. More importantly, it is taking into account a compliance-obsessed world where archival and retrieval of data is just about as important as security.

The Oracle-PeopleSoft deal was also rubber-stamped this week. That had been on the cards for much longer and in some ways is less significant. It simply said the market is served by too many providers. Ellison's main goal was to buy customers.

Symantec-Veritas is more about comprehensively catering to user organisations' needs. It is getting hard to be a second-tier but big software player.

And so we'll see the Veritas name go, left to so many other types of companies around the world that adopted it long ago.

A just as interesting point surrounds Veritas CEO Gary Bloom. This publication has met both Bloom and Symantec boss John Thompson over the past six months. Both are class acts. The difference is that Thompson will sit astride an even bigger software being while Bloom becomes the customary president and vice chairman. Don't expect Bloom to stick around longer than he has to.

A one-time general at Oracle (yes, them again), Bloom is a CEO by vocation. That's his view and given his ability and record it's hard to disagree.

So the storage software market will likely lose both a prominent executive and established corporate brand. But make no mistake, this deal isn't about taking out an opponent. Until recently few would have even mentioned the two companies written about here in the same breath.

For the money involved, we'd hope Symantec, Veritas and their many advisors would have thought through the reasons why spending $13.5bn is the right move. There is clearly a need for what they both do but provided from the same organisation? We'll see.