Symantec will retain its consumer-facing product portfolio, which includes the the LifeLock identity-protection brand and Norton antivirus software. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has been on an acquisition spree in recent years as the company pushes through a major pivot into the enterprise software market.
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Thus, Symantec took the strategic move of broadening its product base, particularly in specialty niche software categories. To take advantage of such software developments of other, smaller firms, Symantec formed its Turner Hall Publishing division to publish third-party software. More significantly, Eubanks decided that the company would expand its product offerings through acquisitions of other software companies.
This involved not only obtaining a company's products but also retaining the company's programmers in order to continue to develop new products in the given category and its marketing staff who had established client relationships. At the same time, Eubanks decided to structure Symantec's organization into complete teams for each product.
This involved establishing product groups comprising all the functions of product development, quality assurance, marketing, documentation, and technical support. Subsequently, when other companies were acquired by Symantec, product autonomy was maintained.
This way, employees of acquired companies who were accustomed to working in small companies were able to maintain a sense of the small company culture.
Symantec began its acquisition campaign in Living Videotext was the developer of ThinkTank, a presentation graphics program for the Macintosh, and Grandview, an information management program for the PC. The number of employees likewise nearly doubled, to reach in , with 90 percent of the acquired companies' employees staying on. Direct sales representatives increased from 20 to The portion of Symantec's sales to large corporations rose from 18 percent to about 35 percent in Symantec's existing products also benefitted from the acquisitions through the ability to provide complementary software package combinations.
For a relatively small company, managing such acquisitions was not easy. Although sales doubled, Symantec suffered net losses due to the costs of the acquisitions. While product management was kept separate, the acquired companies' finance, administration, personnel, and public relations functions all had to be merged.
The restructuring was complicated by the loss of top managers. The founders of acquired companies Videotext and Think Technologies decided to leave Symantec.
Eubanks proceeded to reorganize the company to reduce the number of top executives and give more authority to middle managers. These management and financial difficulties all contributed to the postponement of an initial public offering, which Symantec had originally planned for May of After six years of losses, Symantec finally became profitable in , or fiscal year ending March 31, On June 23, , the company made its initial public offering.
A stock split went into effect in September, By November of that year the stock price was five times higher than it was when it went public, and it was selling at 64 times earnings. The high stock price supported Symantec's acquisitions, which were usually bought in exchange for Symantec stock.
Flat-file databases, in contrast to relational database programs, require all the data to be in a single file. Symantec made its biggest acquisition to date in August of when it purchased the highly successful Peter Norton Computing Inc. This software package historically has been the market leader in PC utilities software.
Utilities are programs that perform functions such as backing up and compressing files, checking for viruses, and restoring lost data. The purchase also helped Symantec, whose utility products were more heavily weighted towards the Macintosh platform, expand into the PC utilities market. Most of Norton Computing's employees were retained. The merger also helped Norton Computing regain the market share it was losing to competitors, especially Central Point Software.
Norton Computing's revenues tripled between June of and September of , and by November it appeared to have regained the market lead over Central Point. Norton Computing's merger with Symantec has since been cited as one of the most successful acquisitions in the software industry. Symantec made three more acquisitions in In August it acquired Zortech Inc. Even during the recession of the early s, which was especially severe in California, Symantec continued to grow.
Symantec also expanded in Europe. The company opened a European manufacturing facility outside of Dublin, Ireland, in October of The facility subsequently began supporting Symantec's customers outside of North America. In May, , Symantec began selling Norton Utilities and certain other software packages in the Soviet Union through three official distributors. To combat rampant software piracy in Russia, Symantec also offered after-sale services and technical support to registered users.
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