Symantec

The Symantec corporation is an American software house that was founded in 1982. It has been listed with NASDAQ since 23 rd June, 1989 (SYMC). The company's headquarters are in Cupertino (California, USA), the geographical heart of Silicon Valley.

In December 2004 the company announced that it would take over the backup specialist VERITAS Software for 13.5 billion US dollars. Since then the company has risen to be one of the biggest software houses worldwide.

VERITAS Software has developed the first commercial journaling file system, the Veritas Journaling File System (VxFS). In the area of data protection software this was followed up by the SOHO solution "Backup Exec" and in the enterprise area "NetBackup". The Veritas Cluster Server (VCs) is offered as a support for highly available and parallel computer clusters: it is the market leader with commercial cluster solutions. With SUN/Solaris systems VERITAS, offering the Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM), is virtually a monopoly as regards volume management tools. For some years now Veritas has also been active in the Linux area with the VxVM.

With Enterprise Vault, Symantec offers its enterprise customers a product for archiving mail, fileserver and instant messaging data.

A decisive advantage of Symantec's (VERITAS) products is the broad platform support. NetBackup and the VCS are available for Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP-UX and Windows, amongst others.

Symantec operates branch offices in 40 countries and employs a total of 14,000 staff.