Symantec's acquisition of Axent, after the deal is approved by both companies' shareholders, will launch the software company into the enterprise computing space.
The enterprise is expected to count for 50% of Symantec's revenue stream by 2001 and the company has had to look for new roads to market - particularly the corporate consulting houses. However, it first has to tackle the integration of the two companies' product families.
According to William Seay, director of Symantec's global integration, the company is in active talks with the big five corporate consulting houses on an international basis.
Local marketing manager Robyn Weeda confirms that Symantec South Africa has also made contact with the local divisions of the consulting firms. Seay sees the benefit from such partnerships stemming mostly from their evangelising the product.
Before Symantec can offer a true corporate solution, it must first undertake the task of integrating Axent's product suite with its own.
Seay believes the market will start seeing product at the beginning of next year. "What we will deliver will not be a suite - it will be a family of modular, interoperable, scalable products."
Symantec's advantage, he believes, will be an intrusion detection product that spans both the host and the network. "Symantec was already planning on delivering an integrated host- and network-based intrusion detection product next year," he says.
"Axent already has host-based and a network-based intrusion detection products. At Symantec we believe that security is only as strongest as its weakest link."
The release of Symantec's desktop firewall underlines its strategy to protect the desktop and mobile user, with mobile seen as a particularly strong driver for host security.
Although Seay claims the companies do not have a product overlap, both have management consoles. He describes a unified management console spanning the breadth of the security product line - including third-party products - as a "catalyst to our enterprise strategy".
Seay believes the management console will probably take the best of what Symantec and Axent's consoles have to offer.
He also sees his current channel leveraging such a console to provide customers with a greater value proposition.
"We will see the development of what I call the managed security provider [MSP]," says Seay. These MSPs will gain extra revenue to the typical security lifecycle by monitoring the client's security through the management console, and offering them a proactive security service similar to a virtual armed response.
"Today monitoring is not a huge growth area," says Seay, "but we see this taking off in the next two years, especially in companies that cannot afford their own IT security departments."
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