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John W Thompson is the man at the helm of affairs at one of the software powerhouses of the world. As chairman and CEO of Symantec, he's also the man behind a number of strategic acquisitions for the company, including the software industry's largest ever: the Veritas acquisition, amidst criticism and falling stock price. Nearly a year down, he met up with Prasanto K Roy and Shipra Arora of Dataquest, on his first-ever visit to India. He talked about life after the merger, his strategic vision for the company, the big Indian opportunity, and the growing threat from Microsoft.

This is your first visit to India. What took you so long?
It's almost embarrassing to say, but the reality is that after joining Symantec, we had such a wonderful run financially between 1999 and 2005, that even when the tech stocks in the US were seeing revenues fall and their stock price fall, we continued to climb in our performance. And so, we were not forced to come to India for financial reasons as a lot of other companies were.

And then you got the India development team along with your Veritas acquisition..?
When we acquired Veritas, it had a fairly sizeable presence here in India, in Pune. But it was clear that we not only needed the current presence in Pune, but also a broader presence in India, principally to avail ourselves of the talent pool. It is such a wonderfully talented country from the engineering point of view, that if we want to grow and fulfill our aspirations we have to avail of the talent pool. It has taken me seven years in Symantec to finally get to that point, but we are here now and that's what is important.

How's India as a market?
It's undeniable that with India's 9-10% GDP growth rate, well, you want to be in India.  Ultimately, this will be a very large consumer market, and a robust one as well.  So, Symantec wants to participate and we have terrific team here that's doing a great job.  As a matter of fact, our performance in this market is far greater than the average for both our AsiaPacific region as well as what IDC would say, is the growth rate for the tech sector or the security software sector in general.  

And how about India as a development base? Going forward?
With respect to India as an engineering hub, we now have about 1,700 people operating in Pune. We have a relationship partner in Chennai for outsourced services to our consumer support teams around the world.  We employ, through our partner, about 1,500 people that provide that work.  We moved a small amount of engineering work for our consumer business to Chennai and I would expect that over a course of the next two years or so, we will double our presence in India from an engineering perspective.  We opened a new center of innovation in Pune recently and the excitement I saw in the eyes and hearts and minds of the people there was just incredibly encouraging. The issue for us is how do we manage the migration of work here as we aspire to be a bigger company with a bigger presence in this market.

What's your R&D focus in the India team?
Our business is centered on security and availability and so you would expect portions of that will certainly be here. In particular, for our file system and clustering technologies, which are really at the core of what we do around systems management, more than half of the development activity for those products is based in India.  We have started migrating some of the security capabilities here because prior to Symantec's acquisition of Veritas, it did not have an engineering presence in India.  The team just released its first security product to come out of the India lab, a high performance scanning engine for viruses. They did it in record time. So, I am quite encouraged by what the team has been able to do in a very short period of time-to look for places where we can leverage the skills and knowledge of our team in Pune.

You had three or more senior exits including Greg Myers and Veritas' chief Gary Bloom. Did they not continue to believe in this vision?
Each had his own reason for leaving. Greg Myers had been with me as a teammate and colleague for the six and a half years that I have been at Symantec.  He had personal, family reasons for leaving that I don't want, nor does he in the public press; but all of us have family issues that should take importance, quite frankly, over business, and Greg is still a very good friend and a very loyal supporter of our company. In terms of Gary Bloom, let's face it, our company only needs one CEO. There can only be one leader and I am that. While Gary is a very capable guy and I would have loved to have seen him stay longer, we never had any expectations, candidly, that Gary would stay much beyond one year, which is the typical timeframe for a CEO to be with a company after his company has been acquired.

In this particular case, we had not just Gary who is 44 years old but we had two or three other guys who are in their early 40s and who had an aspiration to someday replace the old guy called Thompson. If Gary stayed, that clearly was going to put it at risk, whether or not the other three or four of them stayed. Candidly, I would have it play out the way it did, ie Gary deciding to leave-he wanted to take a break after a 25-year career! And, with the three or four other guys that are anxious to step up and compete for the chance to run Symantec, I think that's a great thing. It's good for investors, good for our employees, and, ultimately, will prove to be a great thing for our company.

So how do you describe Symantec today, one year down?
Symantec is the leader in infrastructure management technologies.  We both secure your connected experience and ensure the availability of your systems and information that is a part of that connected experience. We worry about protecting the infrastructure layer, the information layer and increasingly the interaction layer. Those are the areas that are most important to large corporate CIOs around the world.  We continue to have a very strong and prominent position in the consumer or retail channels of the business and we have the most diverse product base, the most diverse customer set and the most diverse channel map of any of the companies in the industry. We think that makes us a formidable fourth place software company with the highest growth rate of any software company above $3 bn or $5 bn.

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