Jul 11 2007
By Jim Reavis
This is only a rumor, if it were an actual event you would be instructed by the authorities where to redeem your SYMC stock. Multiple Friends of Risk Bloggers have told me that Symantec has been in talks with investors over their strategic options, with the most likely outcome (if anything happens) being a move to go private! Stepping out of the public markets would likely accelerate the massive industry shakeup we have been seeing, it may soon become pointless to have information security indices if we don’t have stocks to track.
I want to stress that the FoRBs (Friends of Risk Bloggers - of course) are not insiders with Symantec, I am certainly not an insider, my investments consist of a little dirt and contributing to my doctor’s 401k. However, they are smart people who do pay attention. Symantec’s stock has been up and down of late, I think John Thompson is a great CEO and has made some very smart moves to beef up their enterprise solutions, perhaps a couple of years sans SOX will allow the execs to focus more on the business and aligning their healthy security and storage product portfolio with market needs.
We can be certain that the megadeals we have seen in information security are not over. I would certainly think that since Google bought Postini, MessageLabs will get picked up soon, I would assume their Star Technologies Services spinoff announcement in June was the necessary precursor to get a deal done.
I hope to see a bunch of you at BlackHat, with all the M&A going on, we can play musical nametags!
Related posts:
Posted by Jim.Reavis on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007, at 2:54 pm, and filed under Articles, Industry Moves.
Follow any responses to this entry with the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can post a comment, or trackback from your site.
Bloggers fixate on Google security moves — Security Bytes | 13-Jul-07 at 1:50 am | Permalink
[...] watch for the latest merger-acquisition or IPO, but for something a bit different, the folks at RiskBloggers.com are chewing over rumors that Symantec may be about to make a dramatic [...]
» Symantec going private? It’s not a crazy thought | Ryan Naraine’s Zero Day | ZDNet.com | 13-Jul-07 at 9:57 am | Permalink
[...] Reavis at RiskBloggers.com has tossed out this doozy: This is only a rumor, if it were an actual event you would be instructed by the authorities where [...]