Symantec 2010 Annual Report Download - page 86

Acquisitions
Our acquisitions are designed to enhance the features and functionality of our existing products and extend our
product leadership in core markets. We consider time to market, synergies with existing products, and potential
market share gains when evaluating the economics of acquisitions of technologies, product lines, or companies. We
may acquire and/or dispose of other technologies, products and companies in the future.
During fiscal 2010, we completed the following acquisitions:
Company Name Company Description Date Acquired
Gideon Technologies, Inc. A provider of standards-based information security
compliance solutions January 22, 2010
SoftScan A provider of hosted security solutions for e-mail and web
in the Nordic region. October 31, 2009
For further discussion of our acquisitions, see Note 4 of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements in this
annual report.
Competition
Our markets are consolidating, highly competitive, and subject to rapid changes in technology. We are focused
on integrating across the product portfolio and include next-generation technology capabilities into our solution set
in order to differentiate ourselves from the competition. We believe that the principal competitive factors necessary
to be successful in our industry include time to market, price, reputation, financial stability, breadth of product
offerings, customer support, brand recognition, and effective sales and marketing efforts.
In addition to the competition we face from direct competitors, we face indirect or potential competition from
retailers, application providers, operating system providers, network equipment manufacturers, and other OEMs,
who may provide various solutions and functions in their current and future products. We also compete for access to
retail distribution channels and for the attention of customers at the retail level and in corporate accounts. In
addition, we compete with other software companies, operating system providers, network equipment manufac-
turers and other OEMs to acquire technologies, products, or companies and to publish software developed by third
parties. We also compete with other software companies in our effort to place our products on the computer
equipment sold to consumers and enterprises by OEMs.
The competitive environments in which each segment operates are described below.
Consumer
Some of the channels in which our consumer products are offered are highly competitive. Our competitors are
intensely focused on customer acquisition, which has led such competitors to offer their technology for free, engage
in aggressive marketing, or enter into competitive partnerships. Our primary competitors in the Consumer segment
are McAfee, Inc. (“McAfee”), and Trend Micro Inc. (“Trend Micro”). There are also several smaller regional
security companies and freeware providers that we compete against primarily in the EMEA and APJ regions. For
our consumer backup offerings, our primary competitors are Mozy, Inc., owned by EMC Corporation (“EMC”), and
Carbonite, Inc.
Security and Compliance
In the security and management markets, we compete against many companies that offer competing products
to our solutions. Our primary competitors in the security and management market are LANDesk Software, Inc.,
McAfee, Microsoft Corporation (“Microsoft”), and Trend Micro. There are also several smaller regional security
companies that we compete against primarily in the EMEA and APJ regions.
In the SaaS security market our primary competitors are Google Inc.’s Postini Services and Microsoft.
10