Symantec lines up bigger service play

PUNE: Symantec, the $5.25-billion global security solutions and services provider, is increasing its presence in the services segment globally. India will be a natural choice for its service hub to be located at its two centres, namely the 15-year-old Pune unit and the newly set up Chennai facility. It could also outsource some work to its Indian partners, either existing or new.

“We are increasing our growth in services, which is now very small in India. The two areas we are targeting are operational services, where software remains installed at the customer location and we manage remotely from India. Some of this work we could do ourselves and some could be outsourced to Indian partners. The second area is consulting services which are currently being delivered onsite. We will now offer a mix of onsite and India (offsite) delivery,” vice-president (India technical operations), Veritas Software India Pvt, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Symantec, Anil Chakravarthy said.

Symantec’s enhanced service focus in India will be launched from September-October 2007 and is part of its stated position of doubling global services revenues from the 5% now to 10% by 2010. Symantec’s newly-opened centre in Chennai will focus on Security 2.0 which is all set to scale up its headcount to 1,000 over the next few years, , apart from carrying out all other technology support and R&D work. Mr Chakravarthy explained that Security 2.0 is the next generation of the Norton line which protects the machine, user and his/her identity.

“Cyber crime is targeted at stealing customer information. This is a US $2-billion per annum market, and we are targeting the software market for consumer security, ISPs and OEMs,” Mr Chakravarthy stated.