Q&A: CEO Salem explains Symantec's plan to survive recession

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- Enrique Salem, who this week took the reins of Symantec Corp., spoke to a packed hall at Storage Networking World here this week about his company's plans to focus on technologies such as thin provisioning and data de-duplication, which he said can help companies better use the assets they have in order to stave off purchasing more hardware. Computerworld editor in chief Scot Finnie and storage editor Lucas Mearian sat down with Salem at SNW to ask him about his vision for Symantec, what IT security threats may lie ahead and how the recession is affecting the high-tech industry.

How is the economy affecting demand for security products and services? How are enterprise customers prioritizing their security spending in this economic climate? Security is something you need all the time, independent of the economic environment. We found people continue to buy security because they need to protect their information. So we think security continues to do well or better than other sectors in tech spending. What we're hearing about budgets, though, is that they're going to be flat to down in this fiscal year, but we do think security will be more resilient.

Does that make your business or parts of it recession-proof?I don't want to go that far, but I will say that security will absolutely do better in a recession.

What do you see as the most important trends in IT this year? Virtualization continues to be a hot topic. I know we've been talking about virtualization for several years, but it's not just server virtualization, but it's also storage virtualization [and] end-point virtualization because you can drive real efficiencies. Another trend is software as a service. We absolutely believe that people are going to think about their core competencies. What are the things they have to be good at and what can they allow other third parties to take advantage of. We at Symantec expect that 20% of our business over the next five years will be delivered as a service.

Enrique Salem, president and CEO of Symantec

Another important trend we see is something we refer to as the "consumerization" of IT. The workforce is changing, and the people coming to work every day are bringing new devices. I think IT has to start thinking about how to embrace these new technologies: everything from your iPhone to social networking technologies that I think will start changing what we do inside of organizations.

What are Symantec's biggest enterprise challenges over the next year or so? Symantec has grown through acquisitions. We went from being a $600 million company in 1999 to a $6 billion company today, and we've done that through about 30 acquisitions. What we need to do is continue to drive the integration of those technologies because our customers don't want point products. They want integrated security suites. We need to do a better job of continuing to integrate our technologies.