• Brightmail – Top notch anti-spam filtering engine
• Anti-Virus Engine – Well known and loved (or hated)
• IMlogic – The core instant messaging security engine
• Vontu – Advanced filtering technology for Data Loss Prevention (or Protection depending on the day of the week)

These four elements are all integrated on the boxes and I joked whenever I showed it that three were Symantec technologies, though you’d be amazed how many people didn’t know, and the forth would probably be soon. I didn’t do so with any insider knowledge! Just knew that the technology was too good to stay integrated and yet outside the organisation for too long!

The team I’m in is a group of specialists called “Information Risk Management” and it will be very interesting to see if we get the European Vontu employees in with us at somepoint soon. From my experience so far of this area of business need is that it’s only getting more and more important as our organisations (and in fact our entire economies) are being built on growing stack of data. How it’s managed, for good or for bad, internally or externally, with ease or pain – all these are going to be critical. I repeat again – Woo-hoo-Vontu!

If you searched on our good friend Google for “Symantec appliances” you’d get the following results as the top two:

Symantec turns off on security appliances | The Register

Symantec is scaling down its hardware offering by pulling the plug on a range of network security appliances. The vendor will stop designing and making the …
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/27/symantec_appliances/

Avoid Symantec appliances, says Gartner – vnunet.com

Analyst firm predicts that Symantec will exit market sector.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2159677/gartner-advises-avoiding

Oh dear, that doesn’t bode well for me in my new role at Symantec where my two focus products at the moment are Enterprise Vault (formerly KVS, archiving software) and the Mail Security 8300 Series appliance! I’ve only been in the role two weeks and I’ve already overheard colleagues describe themselves loosing business because “.. we don’t do appliances”. I repeat, yes, Symantec still make appliances… and they’re very good! They don’t make the hardware, it’s well spec’d Dell kit, but they do everything else involved in getting an appliance developed and with customers.

The communication problem stems from an exit from making appliance hardware and forming a partnership with Juniper that occurred mid-last year. The releases weren’t particularly clear and the press certainly focused on the “stopping making appliances” part of them. I’m still not fully clear on what has happened/is happening with those “SNS” and “SGS” products but “SMS” (Symantec Mail Security) is going strong. Amusingly the road-map code names for the upcoming releases are mountain names which keep getting higher and higher… I hope they’re pacing themselves on the way to Everest! Though I hear sub-ocean mountains are higher…

It’s going to be a challenge reversing the perception that Symantec don’t make appliances and that they are a worthy and safe investment for customers to make but I’m sure our team is up to the task! The most frustrating thing for me so far is working out what is publicly promotable about the products and what is “secret”. Everything seems to be marked “Internal Only” by default and only gets made “External” if someone asks the right person the right question about the right material and they agree. I’m still trying to discover the best way for me to change that without stepping on too many toes or ruffling too many feathers!

Symantec Enterprise Vault; Symantec Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator; Symantec Enterprise Vault Compliance Accelerator; Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series; Symantec IM Manager; Symantec Information Foundation Mail Security for Exchange; Symantec Mail Security for Domino; and Symantec Web Security for Microsoft ISA (Internet Security and Acceleration) Server.

Of those listed I’m very familiar with the first 5 and they are all excellent products, especially the Enterprise Vault and 8300 series. eWeek also say:

Symantec Information Foundation is available as a single enterprise license and is priced on a subscription basis, per user, per year. Estimated pricing starts at $95 per user, per year, with volume and multi-year discounts available.

I was joking to someone I know at Symantec that it’s a bit Lord of the Rings, one CAL to rule them all, one CAL to bind them and decided to mock up the image so they could use it for marketing purposes!

technorati tags: symantec, informationfoundation, enterprisevault

Whenever I talk to people about working with Symantec they always say “Oh yeah, the ones who make the anti-virus … That ruined my computer” … or something similar. These people often include hardcore IT professionals. Take a look at the comments on this high profile ZDNet blog. How on earth are they going to get past this negativity? If you take a look at the products pages on their site you’ll see they do a huge amount in a number of areas.

You know what they should be doing? Getting out there and on these blogs and forums using the abundance of tools out there for tracking what people are saying and countering negative with positive. Engaging with the issues which are often repeated again and again. The excellent Jon Udell recently interviewed Paul English on his weekly podcast who stuck his entire staff on support so they would fully appreciate customers problems. I know 30 staff are different from 16,000 but there has to be some parrells!

technorati tags: symantec, communication

Security software company Symantec Corp. said Tuesday that it had signed a definitive agreement to buy IMLogic, a maker of security software for instant messaging applications, based in Waltham, Mass. [link]

This is something I thought would happen in 2006 but I was surprised by how early in the year it is! Symantec and IMlogic have been partners for a while with their virus scanning engine being a plugin to the IM Manager product allowing for the scanning of file transfers and they’ve also been collaborating on marketing efforts through joint webinars.

As someone who is involved in solutions that are often built on IMlogic software I’m very interested to see what the effect is on their partner program. IMlogic in the EMEA region has not had a heavy direct services offering but I have no idea about Symantec’s presence in the UK corporate market.

Congratulations to all in the IMlogic team on the news, I’ve never met an unhelpful person at the company yet and I’m sure you’ve all recieved some “compensation” from the move!