Symantec Takes Laissez-Faire Approach

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,389056,00.asp

July 18, 2002 
By Dennis Fisher 

A day after shaking the security industry out of its summer doldrums
by making three major acquisitions, Symantec Corp. officials said that
for the time being they have no plans to meddle in how Recourse
Technologies Inc., Riptech Inc. and SecurityFocus run their
businesses.

The companies' respective technologies eventually will be integrated
wherever makes sense, but they will continue to be sold as is in the
near term, said Gail Hamilton, executive vice president of product
delivery and response at Symantec, based in Cupertino, Calif.

"Over time, for example, we'll do things like integrate [Recourse's]
ManHunt with our security management system," Hamilton said. "But we
intend to run them as stand-alone businesses for the foreseeable
future."

SecurityFocus, for example, will continue to maintain its popular
security mailing lists and portal Web site.

That's not to say that there won't be some changes, however. There
will likely be some job losses in areas where there are redundancies
or overlap, such as administrative and back-office departments,
Hamilton said. But Symantec anticipates that all of the top executives
and other key employees from the three companies will remain once the
acquisitions are finalized, which should be some time in August.

The CEOs of Recourse, Riptech and SecurityFocus will all become vice
presidents and will report to Hamilton. But they will each retain
direct control of their respective product lines and will take on
other responsibilities where appropriate.

Symantec on Wednesday agreed to pay $355 million in cash for the three
security companies.

Executives at SecurityFocus were surprised by Symantec's interest in
acquiring their firm.

"We absolutely were not looking or being shopped around," said Arthur
Wong, co-founder and CEO of SecurityFocus, based in San Mateo, Calif.,
which sells threat management solutions and maintains a huge database
of vulnerability information. "We've been getting good traction,
winning new customers and we were actually getting to profitability
ahead of schedule. It was just a really good fit with Symantec."

Wong added that Symantec officials have assured him that SecurityFocus
will retain its independence and ability to publish objective
information about vulnerabilities, including those found in Symantec
products. The company's Bugtraq mailing list is perhaps the most
well-known and widely read security list on the Internet and is often
the first place that researchers publish information on new
vulnerabilities.

"The charter for SecurityFocus, our community and Bugtraq is exactly
the same," he said.



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