Symantec was founded in 1982 by computer guru Peter Norton. Its current world headquarters are located in Cupertino, California, while its main manufacturing facility is in Dublin, Ireland. Symantec originally wrote repair and restoration software for those 1980’s computers that just couldn’t seem to work right. Its current ventures include: firewall, anti-virus, diagnostic/repair, communications, and VPN. Its fiscal revenues for the 2001 year were 944.2 million dollars. The company is publicly traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol, SYMC. The company has expanded from its humble beginnings through a series of ruthless corporate takeovers as listed in the companies’ history;
- October 2001 - Lindner & Pelc Acquisition
- July 2001 - Foster-Melliar Acquisition
- December 2000 - AXENT Technologies Acquisition
- February 2000 - L-3 Network Security Acquisition
- December 1999 - ACT! and Visual Café Divestiture
- July 1999 - URLabs Acquisition
- November 1998 - Quarterdeck Corporation Acquisition
- September 1998 - Acquisition of Intel's anti-virus business and systems management technology
- June 1998 - Binary Research Limited (Ghost) Acquisition
- May 1998 - Acquisition of IBM's anti-virus business and immune system technology
- November 1995 - Delrina (WinFax) Acquisition
- June 1994 - Central Point Software Acquisition
- August 1990 - Peter Norton Computing, Inc. Acquisition
So what if 485 companies on the Fortune 500 use Symantec products? I’m not a Fortune 500 company. How does Symantec affect me? Well for one, Symantec makes excellent firewall and anti-virus products. You do have anti-virus on your computer right? The friendly folks at Symantec keep your computer safe at night from evil lines of code! You may quite possibly own some of their computer maintenance programs. Symantec makes a defrag program that defragments more than twice as fast as the little program built into windows. You do defrag your hard drive on a regular basis don’t you? Good. Ever had the urge to clone a hard drive onto millions of other hard drives for data backup purposes? Well Symantec has lots of fun backup programs that you or your godly admin uses on a regular basis. All in all, Symantec is a pretty nifty company that provides about 4,000 people with jobs and provides you with quality computer software.