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

25.06.2009

And psychologically, there are a lot of people who think about control: "I don't want to give up control. If I put it out in the cloud, I can't see it, I can't touch it. Maybe it's not going to work." There's that mentality. That's dying down though.

IDGNS: Let me ask you about some of the changes you're making. What is the biggest change in the Enrique Salem Symantec.

Salem: Org structure. We have an enterprise product group with a group of people focused on security, and we assigned the CTO in the enterprise group to focus on integration and quality. So new org structure, new security group, new CTO focused on integration and quality. We've got to bring the portfolio together so we can create a better value proposition.

Two, we've got to speak with one voice. People know us for everything. Some people know us for antivirus, some people know us for backup, some people know us for Altiris systems management, some people know us for Norton. We've got to consistently talk about one thing: We're going to secure and manage information and we're going to commoditize infrastructure.

The third thing is as an internal company, we've got to drive innovation. Things like, what's the next generation of security -- this notion of reputational security -- we have to drive these big profound changes in how people secure what they do.