Symantec Africa geared for growth

By Alex Kayle for Symantec
Johannesburg, 28 Apr 2009

Security giant Symantec is bullish on growing its African operations as it perceives the global economic crisis as a silver lining for its business strategy.

During a visit to SA last week, John Brigden, Symantec senior vice-president for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said Symantec is making significant investments in Africa, seeing the emerging region as an opportunity to expand its business.

“The challenging market is our biggest opportunity,” says Brigden. “But the real challenge is to enable our customers to use more power-efficient technologies. The conversations we're having with our customers are around cutting costs and managing IT systems effectively.”

Connected Africa

According to Brigden, the new undersea broadband fibre optic cables coming to the continent mid-year will create a lot of opportunities. However, increased Internet access will also result in an increasing number of security threats.

Brigden notes: “As Africa becomes more connected, there's no doubt that we will see more security threats emerging. The attacks are becoming more malicious. The threats are all aimed at benefiting the criminals and misappropriating confidential financial information from companies. There's a whole active underground economy where data is being stolen and sold.”

Growing the channel

Brigden says Symantec's channel strategy this year is a continuation of last year's plan to empower its channel partners. “This year, Symantec is going to continue its partner certification programmes and is looking at our distribution channel from a vertical perspective. We've enabled our partners more effectively, looking at what they do best and rewarding them for the opportunities they bring to the table.”

One of Symantec's main drivers this year is its 'stop buying storage' initiative built upon its focus of helping businesses optimise and consolidate their existing systems to improve business efficiency, secure systems and cut costs.

Brigden says: “Symantec is well positioned to give a horizontal view of the infrastructure that will drive cost-efficiency and return on investment to manage infrastructure while helping companies to preserve their human resources and run their businesses.”

Cutting costs

According to Brigden, organisations operate at only 30% to 40% utilisation of their systems. The IDC states that the year-on-year 2009 total IT spend in SA grew by 6.1%, amounting to $12 591 million. Bridgen urges companies to optimise their existing assets to save on costs. “Companies are trying to reduce their IT budgets, but at the same time, data volumes are expanding. In these economic times, efficiency has never been more important.”

According to a Symantec IT budget strategy report, the industry averages for new data growth is between 10% to 20% and storage capacity is growing 50% to 60%.

Symantec states a minority of organisations actually track their capacity utlisation and that idle capacity consumes more power, increases cooling costs, floor space and maintenance with no return on the investment.