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Symantec posts mixed Q3 results, shifts focus to Veritas spinoff

Just last week, Symantec unveiled a new name for the information management spinoff: Veritas Technologies.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

Symantec published fiscal third quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, and the calendar year at least is off to a slow start.

The security software maker reported a net income of $222 million, or 32 cents per share (statement).

Non-GAAP earnings were 53 cents per share on a revenue of $1.638 billion.

But Wall Street was looking for earnings of 49 cents per share with at least $1.67 billion in revenue.

In October, Symantec made good upon rumors that the beleaguered tech brand would split, following a road being paved in Silicon Valley by the likes of eBay and Hewlett-Packard.

Thanks to a unanimous decision by Symantec's Board of Directors, the plan became to divide the Mountain View, Calif.-based company into two brands: one business focused on security and one business focused on information management.

The Information Management business will consist of backup and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery, storage management, and information availability services.

Just last week, Symantec unveiled a new name for the IM business: Veritas Technologies. The Veritas business generated $2.5 billion in revenue for Symantec in fiscal 2014.

Shifting the focus from the missed revenue target to the upcoming spinoff, Symantec CEO Michael Brown boasted Veritas is "experiencing accelerating growth, driven by double-digit revenue growth for both our NetBackup appliances and NetBackup software."

The security business will retain consumer and enterprise endpoint security, endpoint management, encryption, mobile, Secure Socket Layer certificates, user authentication, data loss prevention, hosted and managed security, and mail, web and datacenter security services.

Symantec has staffed up on the security side with two executive additions to the division's leadership team in November. According to the mixed Q2 report published in November, the information management business spinoff was projected to be completed by the end of December 2015.

For the fiscal fourth quarter, Wall Street expects Symantec to deliver $1.63 billion in revenue with earnings of 49 cents per share.

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