Steve Bennett

Symantec Corp. late Wednesday used its second fiscal quarter 2013 financial analyst call to unveil the departure of William Robbins, executive vice president of worldwide sales, as part of a move to streamline the company's sales organization.

Symantec also said it beat analyst expectations by a reporting a 1 percent year-over-year revenue increase and a 6 percent earnings increase over last year for the quarter, which ended Sept. 28.

Symantec did not name a replacement for Robbins. Instead, the company is reorganizing its global sales team into regional groups, with each group leader reporting directly to Steve Bennett, Symantec's chairman, president, and CEO.

[Related: Symantec CEO Salem Is Out As Q1 Profits Fall]

Bennett said such a change will ensure that non-U.S. voices will be integrated into Symantec's road maps and strategy, an important consideration given that about 51 percent of Symantec's revenue comes from outside the U.S. The result will make Symantec look like a global company instead of one that has global distribution.

In a transcript of the conference call provided by Seeking Alpha, Bennett said Symantec is evaluating strategic alternatives to reflect the fact that the company is looking more and more like a global company.

That distinction could be important for Symantec going forward. The company reported that second-quarter revenue in the Americas grew by only 2 percent over last year compared to 6-percent growth in the Asia-Pacific and Japan areas to reach 20 percent of its total revenue.

"As you can see from our recent history, our growth rates are higher outside the U.S. ... To better position us to win globally, we've decided to elevate the geo leadership roles and have them report directly to me. This move expands the scope of our regional leaders, making them ambassadors and general managers of their geographies. While their primary focus will be sales in their geographies, they will also play an expanded Symantec leadership role. We believe this will allow us to accelerate our pace of change and make better and faster decisions so we perform at a higher level on both a global and local basis," Bennett said.

The departure of Robbins is the third major executive departure for Symantec this year, and follows the company's firing in July of Enrique Salem as president and CEO.

Randy Cochran, Symantec's vice president of channel sales for the Americas, in May resigned after eight years of being the face of the company's partner program and was replaced with John Eldh.

NEXT: Security Business Up, Storage And Server Management Down

For its second fiscal quarter of 2012, Symantec reported GAAP revenue of $1.699 billion, up 1 percent over the actual revenue of $1.681 billion reported last year, and up 5 percent when adjusted for currency changes. That beat Wall Street estimates of $1.66 billion.

GAAP income for the quarter increased to $193 million, or 27 cents per share, up from $182 million, or 24 cents per share during the year-ago quarter.

Non-GAAP income was reported at $322 million, up 9 percent over last year's $295 million. That translated to 45 cents per share, up 15 percent from last year's 39 cents per share.

Symantec's security and services business fared fairly well during the second quarter, but its storage and consumer business fell year-over-year compared to last year.

Revenue from Symantec's security business rose 6 percent to $512 million, while its security business rose nearly 2 percent to $64 million.

However, the company's storage and server management business fell nearly 2 percent to $595 million, while its consumer business slipped less than 1 percent to $528 million.

Symantec's Bennett in the Seeking Alpha transcript said during the call that it is hard to know what to expect after a company announces an unplanned CEO change, as happened with Symantec in July.

"I'm pleased to report that the team stepped up during this transition," he said. "While working on our plan to change and improve the company for our customers, employees, partners and shareholders, we executed well in the second quarter, delivering better-than-expected financial results. While the team focused on delivering in the current quarter, we are also working on creating value over a longer term time horizon."

Symantec's share prices on Thursday rose 6.7 percent to $18.54.

PUBLISHED OCT. 25, 2012