Veritas Is Back
After a decade in the corporate embrace of Symantec Corp., Veritas will emerge again as its own entity in a separation planned for December.
Symantec revealed the plan to split into two independent, publicly traded companies back in October, but on Wednesday revealed that the name of the information management company will be Veritas Technologies Corp.
The name is nearly identical to the pre-acquisition name of the business, Veritas Software Corp.
"Veritas remains a powerful brand that still has tremendous equity with our customers, partners and employees, and after careful review it was an easy choice as a name for our information management business," said Michael A. Brown, Symantec president and CEO, in a statement.
Symantec unveiled the new Veritas logo Wednesday.
The information management portion of the business includes backup and recovery software and appliances, storage management, clustering, disaster recovery, archiving and e-discovery solutions. According to Symantec, the products are in use in 75 percent of the Fortune 500 and accounted for $2.5 billion of Symantec's revenues in fiscal year 2014. In 2004, the year before Symantec's $13.5 billion deal to acquire Veritas Software closed, Veritas' revenues amounted to about $2 billion.
Symantec's security business is larger, accounting for $4.2 billion in revenues for the most recent fiscal year.
Symantec announced on Oct. 9 that its board of directors approved a plan to separate the company into a security business and an information management business. At the time, Brown said it had become clear that the security and information management businesses required different strategies.
In November, Symantec confirmed that it would be laying off about 2,000 people, or 10 percent of its 20,000-strong workforce, as part of the split.
Veritas was the centerpiece of a series of about 30 acquisitions that Symantec made between 2004 and 2012.
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 28, 2015