Symantec's decision to merge with Veritas two years ago may have been unexpected, but the strategy has been ratified, and Symantec has had "great fun" watching other players in the industry follow its lead.
David Sykes, vice president of Symantec Asia Pacific, said the decision to merge with Veritas was made once it became clear that consumers wanted more than a "straight security solution".
"It was consumers saying, 'I want to be protected and it is more than just security, it is about backup and availability'," Sykes said on Thursday.
"It was those trends and issues that first highlighted to us the fact that straight up, traditional functional security was not going to be good enough. We needed to blend that with availability, backup, performance.
"It has been great fun over the last year to see so many other companies come out and ratify that strategy. EMC and RSA, IBM and ISS, NetApp and Decru. Time and time again we are seeing key players in the industry following the Symantec strategy and starting to bring storage, availability and security together as an offering," Sykes said.
Sykes also hit back at Dennis Hoffman, EMC's VP of information security who recently claimed that the merger with Veritas was driven by legislation in California that required all businesses that have customers in the state to disclose security breaches.
Sykes claims that the increasing penetration of broadband has been a much bigger driving factor.
"I respectfully suggest that the world is not following California law and that there is probably a much broader influence in place in broadband," he said.
"The traditional things we did in functional security -- antivirus, firewall, intrusion detection and vulnerability management -- was not going to give [consumers] the protection they wanted.
"We had to bring a backup and recovery capability to the table. Then, when we went to the enterprise customers, they said 'that's all good, but we also want this stuff to work fast so I want performance as well'.
"That is what drove us -- not a bunch of laws in California," added Sykes.
