The company’s CEO John Thompson also said that Symantec has no short-term plans to develop any authentication or ID management systems.
More details of the improvements to Symantec’s licensing arrangements will soon be revealed, but at the conference the company said that it is poised to launch a free license management tool, and later this summer will launch processor-based licensing for its Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server software.
But whatever Symantec does, its CEO John Thompson doesn’t expect to make his customers entirely happy about software licensing.
It’s like asking in an employee survey: ‘Are you happy with your salary?’ he said. I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where everybody is totally content, he said.
Thompson said the company will complete the merger of it and Veritas Software Corp’s back-end financial systems in the December quarter, and that this will simplify ordering and license management for customers. But he said: I don’t want to over-promise. There will always be a challenge over enterprise software licensing.
The annual Vision conference was originally a Veritas user conference, and at last year’s event the company told attendees that it recognized that customers were unhappy about its licensing schemes, and that it was addressing the issue.
Symantec told Computer Business Review that it will very soon ship free software that will tally up the Symantec software is installed within a customer’s system, covering most Symantec and former Veritas software, and at least easing some of the burden for customers.
It’s either shipping now, or it will be very soon, a senior executive told Computer Business Review. One of the most frequent complaints we get is that customers don’t know what they’ve got installed, the executive said.
Asked about ID management at the conference, Thompson said: I’d love to have it….but we just can’t do everything, and this is one of the things we’ve chosen not to do.
He said: The companies in the security domain that have had the toughest time achieving their top and bottom lines were those focused solely on authentication.
Those comments in strong contrast with the storage sales pitch of Sun Microsystems Inc, which leads with statements about the importance of Sun’s ID management system in security.
A keynote presentation by Symantec’s CTO Ajei Gopal included a demonstration of a device dubbed the Symantec Database Security Appliance, which will ship later this year.
The SDSA will sit inside firewalls, and in front of web servers, and will monitor all inbound database queries.
It can spot SQL injection attacks, as well as anomalous queries or unusual queries, and queries that have provoked databases to issue abnormal amounts of high-value data such as credit card numbers. For each category, the SDSA will issue an alert.
The last point begs an obvious question if the device can identify hackers’ SQL queries that have just caused a leak of valuable data, why doesn’t it just block the outbound response? Symantec said that the SDSA could be developed to do that if enough customers want it to.
