Symantec Details First Combo

Symantec this week is launching its first attempt at combining its security products with the storage, backup and recovery products of recently acquired Veritas Software.

The Cupertino, Calif., vendor’s Email Security and Availability offering is being marketed more as a solution concept than an actual product bundle. It combines Symantec’s e-mail security products with the former Veritas’ Enterprise Vault e-mail archiving product and its backup and recovery offerings, said Nick Mehta, senior director of product management at Symantec. There is no special pricing; rather, the solution costs the sum of its individual parts.

WHAT'S THE CONCEPT? Symantec E-mail Security and Availability >> Combines e-mail security offerings with archiving, backup and recovery >>  Products will be more tightly coupled in the future

With less than six weeks since the acquisition closed, the products have not actually been integrated, but Symantec did complete extensive interoperability testing and “it all works together,” Mehta said.

Within about 12 months, the company plans a more integrated product offering, including a single dashboard for e-mail administration along with content filtering and archiving, Mehta said.

As the “big kahuna” of applications, e-mail is the right place to start combining security and storage products, said Rick Marcotte, CEO and president of DLT Solutions, a large government integrator in Herndon, Va.

“We have been selling these different pieces for some time, but we are now approaching it as a single solution,” Marcotte said. “We can now talk to customers about their overall e-mail strategy.”

While Symantec CEO John Thompson has promised product bundles, Marcotte said he prefers Symantec’s conceptual approach.

“Simplicity is wonderful, but it’s not always easy to predict what should be bundled,” he said. “The key is the channel partners need to know how these pieces are interrelated so that we can be the solution provider.”

As Symantec works to more tightly integrate its product lines, it also is working to integrate its channel partners, Mehta added.

That includes launching training programs to get Symantec security partners up to speed on Enterprise Vault and other Veritas products, he said.