Symantec to add jobs after merger, exec says

As part of that, the security giant will make only a "tiny fraction" of its work force redundant in the Asia-Pacific, as the company consolidates its operations across the region, Steven Leonard, the company's senior vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, said during a press briefing here on Friday.

Leonard declined to specify how many positions would become available worldwide, saying only that Symantec will be adding to the 2,700 employees it currently employs in 17 countries across the Asia-Pacific region.

Symantec has said that it will comment on financial expectations only after it reports its second-quarter results on July 28. However, it has previously predicted that it will end its fiscal 2006, which ends March 31, as a $5 billion company. During its last fiscal year, Symantec generated $2.6 billion, a 38 percent increase over the previous year, while Veritas made $2 billion, a 17 percent increase.

For now, Symantec will be concentrating on working with partners across the Asia-Pacific to bring the company's integrated products to a wider audience, Leonard said. The company is in the middle of a 10-city road show across the region to communicate its product strategy and road map to partners, he noted.

For the next six months, Symantec and Veritas will be testing and certifying each other's products to ensure that they interoperate, explained Edward Lim, Symantec's country manager for Singapore. The newly merged companies will jointly offer products around business continuity, e-mail management and regulatory compliance.

One of the first combinations will feature Symantec's DeepSight and Veritas' NetBackup, which will trigger systems to automatically download updates, he noted.

In the following six to 12 months, Symantec will establish a common user interface, a common licensing structure, a common installation and Live Update integration for integrated products, he said.

At the final phase of integration, which will take place after 12 months, the merged company should have a new information integrity management lineup based on shared technology, applications compliance and performance optimization software, and a seamless support and licensing infrastructure, Lim said.

"We will bundle products in a logical way," he said, adding that one of the first products to be launched will likely be a product that can help ensure the integrity of e-mail messages. It combines Symantec's BrightMail, an antispam software, and Veritas KVS Enterprise Vault, an e-mail archiving software.

Jeanne Lim of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.