Jeremy Burton, who joined Symantec last year via the blockbuster merger with Veritas, has his hands full. As senior vice president of enterprise security and data management, he oversees about $2 billion worth of business. Burton spoke recently with Network World Executive News Editor Bob Brown about how the merger is going and where Symantec is headed with its messaging management strategy.

Overall, where does the Symantec-Veritas integration stand?

It closed last July and since then we've consolidated what were six business units into three [in addition to Burton's group, there are the consumer and storage businesses]. Going into this Symantec and Veritas were both doing well, so we didn't want to break anything. The final piece of the puzzle here is at the end of the fiscal year we'll want to determine how the sales force should look. Once that's done, there is no Veritas and Symantec, there's only Symantec. I'm a Veritas guy and two-thirds to three-quarters of what I own is legacy Symantec.

And what about on the product side?

Product integration is happening on a number of levels. On the e-mail products, some of it is done but the majority is still to come [Symantec has acquired a handful of messaging-related companies, including Brightmail and IMlogic. Part of it is that customers still make separate decisions on e-mail archiving and security, though over time I expect people will start seeing these two as leveraging off each other. We just don't want to move too quickly and create some sort of flying boat: You can have a spam filter if you drag along our archiving engine… Unifying the metadata [from filtering messages and other traffic] and policy management, that’s a no-brainer and we will get on with that.

On the security side of things, our integration is not so much between Symantec and Veritas products, but let's get the Sygate, Whole Security [past Symantec acquisitions] and Symantec client security unified agent footprint on the desktop and let's build out the compliance picture. The area where there is a lot of integration going on is in our mid-market products. You're going to see us roll out a unified offering that is the best of Backup Exec and LiveState. This is not an arm's length hacked integration. This is a new product, which is going to be able to do continuous protection of systems and data from any point in time to any point in time.

Whitepapers

• Gene Kim's Practical Steps to Mitigate Virtualization Security Risks
• Selecting Effective Virtual Directories
• A Modern Approach to On-Demand Email and Data Security
• Best Practices for HP Servers and HP Enterprise Virtual Array in a Microsoft Exchange
• Compliance, Protection, Recovery: A Layered Approach to Laptop Security
• Endpoint Security: Data Protection for IT, Freedom for Laptop Users

View more SECURITY whitepapers

Webcasts

• Key Considerations for a Successful 802.11n Deployment
• Solutions to the Toughest IT Challenges in Remote Offices
• Lowering the Cost of Email Archives
• High Availability for SQL Server 2005 Using Array-Based Replication and Host-Based Mirroring Technologies
• Technical Overview of Exchange Server 2007 with HP Servers and Storage
• Bringing Order and Security to your Mobile Workforce: Corporate Mobility Policy and Device Management On-Demand

View more SECURITY webcasts

Special Reports

• The Evolution of Network Security
• Taking Virtualization Up a Notch
• Learn how to Keep your Mobile Workforce Connected
• The self-managed network

View more SECURITY special reports