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Symantec and Veritas Split in $8 Billion Deal

Symantec Corp. on Tuesday announced it has sold its data-management arm, Veritas Technologies Corp., in a cash deal worth $8 billion.

The new owners of the Veritas business are private equity firm Carlyle Group and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC. Carlyle has tapped Bill Coleman, founder and CEO of BEA Systems, as the new CEO of Veritas. Former 3Com chairman and CEO Bill Krause was named chairman. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year.

Symantec acquired Veritas, a provider of server and storage management solutions and data-protection software, in 2005 for $13.5 billion.

In the fall of 2014, Symantec revealed its plan to split into two separate businesses, with its data-management business retaking the Veritas name. Under the terms of the deal, products such as Backup Exec, NetBackup and Cluster Server will no longer carry the Symantec name.

Veritas re-enters a data-protection market that now has numerous new players -- among them Acronis, ArcServe, Asigra, CommVault, Dell, EMC, IBM, NetApp, Veeam, VMware, Unitrends, Vision Solutions and Zerto -- that have already spent years going after Symantec.

It remains to be seen what Veritas' new owners have in store for the business, particularly with regard to an eventual sale or IPO.

For its part, Symantec said it plans to use the proceeds from the deal to shore up its security business.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.