The Symantec Shuffle

It all started, as stories usually do, with a call to PR. A little birdie had told me I might want to follow up on how Symantec is organizing its execs following the departure of Data Center Group president Kris Hagerman and others in November.

There was just one problem with that: Julie Quattro, Symantec’s former director of Global Public Relations, has also left, or at least so it would appear–her email address bounced, and she’s no longer listed on the Symantec website.

I got in touch with another contact at Symantec who confirmed Quattro left in February.  In the meantime, following up on the advice from aforementioned birdie, I asked about the replacement for Hagerman.

Turns out Symantec has realigned its execs–this part has been public information, but in case you missed it, the groups have been restructured to focus on topic areas rather than on customer size. Enrique Salem, previously group president for sales and marketing, has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer. Under himn, Rob Soderberry is the SVP in charge of the storage and availability management group, which includes the Storage Foundation, CommandCentral and Veritas Cluster Server products. Deepak Mohan, who was a VP in the Backup Exec group, is now the senior vice president of the data protection group, which will join the NetBackup and Backup Exec business units together. Joseph Ansanelli will head up a data loss prevention team, and Brad Kingsbury has been put in charge of the enpoint security and management group. Finally, Francis deSouza will be in charge of the Information Foundation, compliance and security group.

Symantec’s market share and revenue numbers have slipped in recent IDC reports, but the software tracker for the fourth quarter of 2007 shows it bouncing back. Its $518 million in revenues for the quarter was an increase from $471 million in the third quarter of 2007, and up from $446 million in the fourth quarter of 2007.

A lot of moves have been made shuffling around the personnel, but we still find Symantec’s corporate hierarchy more decipherable than its many, many product lines and versions. A while back we asked them to make us a diagram of all their storage software products and how they fit together. We’re still waiting.