Symantec Adds Support Options For Enterprise Products

Expect a series of announcements from Symantec this week related to all aspects of its business.

Today at its Vision 2006 user conference in San Francisco, the company announced plan to provide an integrated portfolio of support services for its complete range of enterprise products. Symantec Business Critical Services is available now to customers with Symantec availability products and will be extended to customers with Symantec security products beginning this summer.

Business Critical Services are targeted at enterprises that want to minimize service interruptions while maintaining a single point-of-contact at Symantec. The services include a designated account manager and advanced support engineers who support multiple product families for a site, region or global data center architecture.

The expanded program will be available to all enterprise customers sometime this summer. Current Business Critical Service and Premium Platinum customers will be able to migrate into the new service portfolio.

On Monday, Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson greeted Vision 2006 attendees with a keynote address. The event is closed to channel press, but the company released a transcript of his remarks.

Thompson explained Symantec's services push as being one of responding to changing customer needs and demands.

"Today, organizations are relying on Web services for software delivery," he said. "They are leveraging business process outsourcing--where they outsource non-core functions--to free them to focus on their core competencies. And they are implementing collaborative processes, enabling them to reach outside the enterprise to collaborate with others in their supply-chain ecosystem."

One key way Symantec will enable this is by optimizing the data center.

"We offer the industry's only comprehensive set of data-center solutions that enable you to standardize on a common software infrastructure layer, to protect and optimize your IT environment," Thompson said. "Our long-term objective--and the final element--is to help you build a data center that delivers IT service management, where IT is dynamic, automated, policy-driven, measurable and completely aligned with the business."

Symantec started off its busy week with financial news. On Tuesday, Symantec reported results for the fiscal fourth quarter and the fiscal year ended March 31. GAAP revenue for the March 2006 quarter was $1.24 billion and non-GAAP revenue was $1.3 billion. For the 2006 fiscal year, GAAP revenue was $4.14 billion and non-GAAP revenue was $5 billion, 8 percent better than in 2005.

GAAP net income for the fiscal fourth quarter was $119 million, down from $120 million for the same quarter last year. Earnings per share also were lower, at 11 cents, compared to 16 cents for the same quarter last year. For fiscal year 2006, Symantec reported net income of $157 million, far below the net income of $536 million for fiscal year 2005, and earnings per share were 15 cents, compared to earnings per share of 74 cents for fiscal year 2005. Both of these decreases were primarily due to the costs of the Veritas acquisition.