Creating competitive advantage by realising customers’ unmet and under-served needs is the goal of any progressive business. But you cannot achieve that in any meaningful way, unless you have a strategy that turns those customers into long-term, loyal and committed ones. In other words, believers in the solutions you design and offer them.

It is these principles that Symantec adheres to and has embraced in its 2013 Strategic Direction Plan, focused on three critical areas also defined as the 'Peaks' against which 'right for the customer' offerings are designed:

• User Productivity & Protection
• Information Security
• Information Management: Availability & Scalability.

Importantly, this strategy has not emerged from any ‘deep bunker’ thinking, but from constant engagement with, and feedback from, customers and partners on precisely why they have opted for Symantec’s solutions...

2013 Internet Security Threat Report, Volume 18

The Internet Security Threat Report provides an overview and analysis of the year in global threat activity. The report is based on data from the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, which Symantec's analysts use to identify, analyze, and provide commentary on emerging trends in the dynamic threat landscape.

Sometimes when we stop and think about how the world is changing, we realise that it already has.

From Symantec’s perspective, as we have learned from our many conversations with customers large and small, nowhere is this more apparent than in IT service delivery.
 
Delivering IT services was never simple, but at least it was linear. Traditional IT departments follow a command-and-control approach: strategy, procurement and related decisions have been made centrally and delivered out to business departments. This model is changing however, driven by factors coming across from business departments and up from the individuals that staff them.
 
Business divisions are unquestionably taking more control over the technologies they depend upon. What we used to know as “shadow IT” – procurements taking place without the knowledge of IT – is emerging from the gloom ...

by Phil Nash, Director Analyst Relations

As many commentators have pointed out over the years, Symantec has been built on two pillars, responding to the needs of both corporations and consumers. While this model has served us well it has sometimes added complexity. 

Even more importantly however, the world, and therefore the environment within which we work, has changed. The line between consumers and businesses is becoming ever more fuzzy: whether or not companies are giving employees budget for technology purchases, across the board people are using their own equipment, software or online services in the workplace.

The phrase “consumerization of IT” has been coined to describe this phenomenon. Equally however, we’re seeing the IT-ization of consumers. People are generally becoming more tech-savvy and, in parallel, less tolerant of what they see as inadequate technology. In parallel, the resulting loss of control is...