SaaS, not shopping, is focus of Symantec's new CEO

25.06.2009

Salem: Let me give you the categories and then I'll come back and talk about each of them: Security, availability -- is it going to be up and running -- and integration.

Security: If I put my customer data into Salesforce.com, is it going to be safe? If you and I are running a company, the last thing we want is for our customer list to get stolen.

Availability is if you and I have our sales force on it, it had better be up and running. If we do backup as a service and you need to recover some data, it had better be available.

And number three is integration with everything you do. You can have an ERP [enterprise resource planning] system; you can have legal discoveries. First you get a legal hold and they say, "save all the e-mails." Everything you talked with Enrique about. You know that "15 percent" comment he made. When did he make it?

The point is, imagine all my e-mail is off in the cloud somewhere. Your legal team is going to want to say, "OK, how do I do e-discovery?" So you've got to be able to integrate with the existing systems, which maybe aren't delivered as a service.