New Symantec will spend a year setting pricing

It could take a year for Symantec to sort out a common pricing strategy after its merger with Veritas, the company admitted on Wednesday.

For now, it will continue with the current pricing strategy while it works "really hard" on deciding what the models will be for the many diverse products in the new $5.1bn (£2.9bn) Symantec portfolio, according to company executives.

The admission came as the company set out its post merger strategy in which it aims to capitalise on the joint worth of the two companies.

"The overlap [between the two companies] is quite small," said Lindsey Armstrong, Symantec's vice-president for Europe, who described Symantec as "a frequent acquirer". Frequent acquirers "tend to outperform the market" she said, predicting solid growth for the company.

But while advertising the merits of the company, Armstrong admitted that licensing was an issue. "We are looking at a range of licensing models," she said. "We have shown what we plan to do now, in six months and in a year. This is definitely in the year range."

The problem for the company is its diverse range of pricing models. Symantec security products have been sold in a variety of ways — from a store product for a single user up to a site licence for thousands of users. Veritas products have tended to be sold on a per-CPU model.

The latter has become more controversial with the advent of multi-core processors where companies, such as Oracle, have opted to charge on a per-core basis, rather than per-processor, raising prices.

Symantec has "experimented with per-CPU pricing" said John Poulter, Symantec's vice-president for Northern Europe, but he said the company would probably continue to see different pricing models for different products.