Symantec has undergone a big reorganization in the nine months after its Veritas acquisition, and its purchase of IMLogic at the start of the year added another piece of business to be assimilated.
When it closed the IMLogic deal, the vendor said its own Brightmail security gateway software and appliances would be updated with IM-related IMLogic features, and the hosted email security service, which Symantec white-labels from an unidentified third-party, would also get the same treatment. On the Veritas side of the Symantec house, it said the Enterprise Vault product, currently used for archiving emails and other documents for speedy retrieval, would be updated to account for IM too.
This week Jeremy Burton, SVP of Symantec’s enterprise security and data management division, confirmed that a new version of IMLogic is in the can and the company’s integration work between Enterprise Vault and IMLogic products has already been completed. It has also started work to provide a system of unified policy management across these products and the Brightmail email security set.
The reach of these systems is also being stretched, according to Burton, so that over the coming 12 to 18 months it should become possible to set a policy that would use a process of scan, filter, and classification to flag an incoming or outgoing email or IM message as suspicious and warranting the attention a compliance officer as a preventative check against potential fraud.
He suggested the moves represent a subtle switch in Symantec’s attentions from its traditional stance of producing systems that eliminate spam, viruses, and manage the security of exclusion to one where its focus considers the broader threat landscape of IP theft and internal fraudulent activity as well as external threats.
Collectively, the product set derived from Brightmail, IMLogic, and the Enterprise Vault email archive system that came to it with the acquisition of KVS is said to be producing revenue of between $200m and $300m, but Burton believes it could be the seeds of a next phase of growth. I think this area of enterprise messaging management is the next big thing. We are seeing 50% growth year on year, and I see it as being a $1bn business in the making, he said.
Burton suggested that Symantec now has all the key components in place that will develop organically, but said more acquisitions could figure. Neither Symantec or Veritas have been frightened about going out to the market to fill a piece that is needed, he said.
On emerging area he flagged as warranting some future development efforts by Symantec is VoIP security, with the prospect of a system that would automate the scan, filter, store, and search process across voice-to-text records of VoIP sessions. We won’t do the voice to text conversion,2 he said, but we will do the systems that can be used to screen those records.
Increasingly, there is a looming threat of lawsuits and legal action against businesses that are starting to use IM or VoIP for business transactions, but do not yet have the same quality of archive, search, and retrieval systems that are provided for email.
