Symantec: SaaS efforts revving
Symantec said its software as a service (SaaS) product will go live later this year.
Symantec CEO John Thompson said on the company's fiscal fourth quarter earnings conference call that its Symantec Protection Network, its first SaaS offering, is on track and the company will also launch more services.
"We are happy with the launch of our beta of the Symantec Protection Network, our first software as a service offering. The Protection Network is a SaaS platform designed to deliver easy-to-use security and availability offerings to small and mid sized companies. The online backup service will enable cost-effective, reliable backup and restoration of business critical data from the convenience of a web browser.
We expect this new service go live later this year and you should expect to see us announce additional SaaS offerings throughout FY2008."
In April Symantec announced the launch of its SaaS effort, which is aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. However, Symantec has to walk a few lines with its SaaS efforts. Symantec has taken pains to allay fears that the SaaS products will sap the profits of its channel partners. In addition, Symantec also relies on shrink-wrapped software for the bulk of its business.
The transition will be notable to watch. Among other details from Symantec's earnings release:
Symantec's results topped estimates in its fourth quarter, but aside from a few upgrades Thursday analysts were generally skeptical about the company's prospects. The company reported earnings of $227 million, or 24 cents a share, excluding items. Net income was $61 million, or 7 cents a share. Analysts were looking for earnings of 20 cents a share, according to Thomson Financial. Revenue was up 5 percent to $1.36 billion. The fiscal 2008 outlook was also better than expectations.
The reaction: "This is similar to what we observed to have happened for the June 2006 quarter, when Symantec exceeded very low expectations, only to miss two quarters after expectations were then set modestly higher. It also appears to us that Symantec is attempting to replicate this strategy of setting very low expectations for the next two quarters," wrote Bear Stearns analyst John DiFucci in a research note.
Other analysts were also concerned about Symantec's ability to execute.
Symantec has fixed its ERP woes. A quarter ago, Symantec stumbled partially because of an ERP implementation. Thompson said:
"I think we are beyond the critical stage where we are making continuous improvements in the systems environment. Clearly we saw improvements in the administrative processes around our services business, that is reflected in the March quarter results. Our licensing portal, which was one of the challenging areas, we have had a subsequent release of software to improve that. There is yet another one coming. As I said in my stated comments, we are in a process now of continuous improvement, because we think we have the right foundational architecture and products in place to support a business that wants the scale."
The company will announce a security release dubbed Hamlet in June at its Symantec's Vision conference. Hamlet aims to combine technologies from various acquisitions. In a nutshell, Hamlet combines technology components from Symantec's anti-virus, anti-spam, firewall, zero day protection and network access compliance efforts into a suite.
Thompson said:
"We are going to extend the beta testing for Hamlet to make sure we get it right, with more than 50-70 million desktops using our products around the world, I am more concerned about getting it right as we did with Norton 360 than rushing it into the marketplace. We’ll talk to you more about the release details at the June conference."