Symantec's 1Q16 Results Fail to Cheer Investors
(Continued from Prior Part)
Information Management didn’t grow in fiscal 1Q16
In the last part of this series, we discussed that Symantec (SYMC) finally announced the sale of Veritas to The Carlyle Group for $8 billion. In fiscal 1Q16, Symantec’s Information Management business—Veritas—posted revenue of $587 million. This was a fall of 10% on YoY (year-over-year) basis. Although NetBackup software and appliances posted double-digit growth, it was the softness in the Backup Exec and Information Availability offerings that marred this segment’s growth in fiscal 1Q16.
Symantec leads the backup and recovery software market with a 30% market share. It’s followed by EMC (EMC) and IBM (IBM) with an 18% and 17% market share, respectively. CommVault and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) are other leading players in this space.
Veritas is part of The Carlyle Group
Its sale to The Carlyle Group will provide Veritas with a renewed focus on its vision to become a leading integrated information management solutions player. In Symantec’s recent earnings release, the IDC (International Data Corporation) shared that Veritas managed to capture 47% market share for the first time in the open systems integrated backup appliance submarket. Veritas’ product portfolio includes backup, appliances, information intelligence, and availability. Now, it aims to renew its focus on software-defined storage. The above chart shows the Veritas Product roadmap in the near future.
New products aim to strengthen Veritas’ position
Symantec shared that it intends to launch NetBackup 7.7 in the summer of 2015. Symantec claims that it would provide improved data center integration across industry platforms with considerably faster cloud performance than its predecessors. InfoScale is another product in the pipeline that will be launched. It will provide availability and software-defined storage to cater to enterprise business continuity requirements.
The Veritas Resiliency Platform will ensure that critical data are accessible across complex multi-vendor physical and virtual environments. The company also shared news about its first cloud application. It’s built on the company’s Information Fabric Technology—Information Map. Information Map is said to give better visibility into unstructured data. It’s aimed to enhance Symantec’s footprint in the big data space.
You can consider investing in the PowerShares QQQ Trust ETF (QQQ) to gain exposure to Symantec. QQQ invest about 0.32% of its holdings in Symantec.
Continue to Next Part
Browse this series on Market Realist: