Gartner Dataquest Report Says Symantec Continues to Gain Market Share as World's Top Security Software Provider

MUMBAI -- July 24, 2003 -- Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that a new Gartner Dataquest report reflects Symantec's continued position as the world's leading security software provider based on new license revenue in 2002. According to the "Worldwide 2002 Security Software Market and Vendor Shares" report, Symantec's market share of the overall worldwide security industry increased from 15 percent in 2001 to 19 percent in 2002, leading the list of the world's top 25 security software vendors.

The growth of Symantec's market share was underscored by the expansion of its lead over the second-place company from less than five percentage points in 2001 to more than nine percentage points in 2002. According to the report, Symantec's year-over-year growth rate of 40 percent more than quadrupled the growth rate of the security software industry as a whole, which came in at nine percent. Overall performance was based on two separate segments covered in the report: security infrastructure software and security administration software.

Symantec retained the top position for the third straight year in the security infrastructure software segment. According to Gartner Dataquest, the segment includes antivirus, encryption, intrusion detection, network security (firewall and virtual private network), web content filtering and security event and performance management software. Symantec expanded its market share from 21 percent in 2001 to 27 percent in 2002 while the nearest competitor's market shrunk two percentage points between 2001 and 2002. Symantec's compound annual growth rate of 39 percent for the period of 2000 to 2002 tripled the industry rate of 13 percent.

"The most significant aspect of this report shows that Symantec's market share continues to grow at a steady rate and outpace the industry as a whole," said John Schwarz, president and chief operating officer, Symantec. "Blended attacks such as SQL Slammer and Bugbear will become more frequent and severe as the time between vulnerability identification and exploitation becomes progressively shorter and shorter. To ward off future cyber threats, customers are adopting an integrated set of security solution that operate at the gateway, server and client levels. Symantec is the only provider that offers a complete integrated alerting, internet posting, customer response and service management solution for the enterprise user."

The security administration software segment included vulnerability assessment and configuration management along with identity and access management solutions. According to the report, Symantec placed tenth in the field of 24 with the offering of only one product, Enterprise Security Manager, and experienced a strong growth rate of 27 percent from 2001 to 2002.

The "Worldwide 2002 Security Software Market and Vendor Shares" report estimates annual new license revenue for software products falling within security software infrastructure and security software administration, as define by Gartner. It estimates revenue recognized by what are mainly software vendors from new license sales recognized in the calendar year. It does not include vendor security revenue associated with software maintenance, with security implementations and other security services, nor from security hardware devices, nor from channel markups. It is a partial estimate of the size of a vendor. The data series in intended to be a measure of market momentum of security software vendors.

About Symantec
Symantec, the world leader in Internet security technology, provides a broad range of content and network security software and appliance solutions to individuals, enterprises and service providers. The company is a leading provider of client, gateway and server security solutions for virus protection, firewall and virtual private network, vulnerability management, intrusion detection, Internet content and e-mail filtering, remote management technologies and security services to enterprises and service providers around the world. Symantec's Norton brand of consumer security products is a leader in worldwide retail sales and industry awards. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has worldwide operations in 36 countries. For more information, please visit www.symantec.com.

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