Symantec 2014 Annual Report Download - page 83

PART I
Item 1. Business
Overview
Symantec Corporation protects the world’s information and is a global leader in security, backup and
availability solutions. Our market leading products and services protect people and information in any
environment – from the smallest mobile device, to the enterprise data center, to cloud-based systems. Founded in
April 1982, Symantec operates one of the largest global threat-intelligence networks, and provides leading
security, backup and availability solutions. The company has more than 20,000 employees in more than 50
countries. Our Internet home page is www.symantec.com. Other than the information expressly set forth in this
annual report, the information contained or referred to on our website is not part of this annual report.
Strategy
The recent transformation of business and consumer technologies has driven pervasive mobility and an
explosion of data resulting in the need for a new approach to protecting devices, applications, data and users.
Further, the emergence of the Internet of Things, where new devices and everyday objects are becoming
networked and connected to the Internet for the first time, highlights the need for comprehensive information
security and management solutions to protect valuable data. We believe that the market for security and
management solutions will benefit from these trends. As a platform-independent software company without bias
to any individual operating system or hardware environment, Symantec helps customers manage more
technologies with greater efficiency and on a wide range of virtual and mobile platforms.
In January 2013, we announced our strategy to transition from being device-centric or protecting endpoints
and the data center, to having a broader focus of protecting and managing digital information. We track a vast
number of threat indicators across the Internet and continuously collect new telemetry from hundreds of millions
of mobile devices, endpoints, and servers across the globe. This massive amount of security data, combined with
our years of experience analyzing such data allows us to provide advanced intelligence and protection for all of
our customers.
During fiscal year 2014, we implemented changes in three areas: simplifying our organizational structure;
redesigning our Go-To-Market (“GTM”) strategy, and changing our product offerings.
Simplifying our Organizational Structure
We aligned our organization by functional areas, rather than by market segments in order to reduce
complexity, remove redundancies, increase the speed of decision making, and improve accountability and
execution. We reduced the number of management layers from our previous structure and increased the average
span of control for managers.
Redesigning our Go-To-Market Strategy
We split our direct field sales team into security and information management specialists focused on new
business only and expanded their territories to be more effective for our enterprise customers. We also built a
renewals group in order to extend the customer relationship and make it easier to renew and do business with us.
We redesigned our global channel strategy focused on building partner competency, rewarding performance, and
customer satisfaction.
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