Symantec CEO reiterates benefits of Veritas merger

Thompson's keynote at the Lehman Brothers Global Software, IT Services and Internet Conference was one of several speeches he has made to investors since Symantec announced in December that it will acquire Veritas. Investor response to the deal has been tepid.

"Customers wish to deal with fewer vendors," making industry consolidation inevitable, Thompson said. Wireless deployments are adding complexity to the computing environment plus Linux will become more widespread, making for more heterogenous environments, he said.

"It is inevitable there will be a competitive alternative to the Windows desktop environment, driven by Linux," Thompson said.

The increasing complexity of heterogenous environments combined with the speed with which vulnerabilities are exploited requires a more holistic approach that the combined company will provide, he said.

Veritas is a leader in backup and recovery and provides strong support for Linux and Unix, he said. With Veritas, If Symantec sees a vulnerability, it can provide backup capabilities to speed recovery in the event of a disruption.

"We think this notion of tying alerting capabilities to operational provisioning tools for backup will go along way in making applications more available," Thompson said.

The combined company can also both secure and archive email in order to make it easier to comply with regulatory requirements, he added.

"We've had wonderful reaction" from customers, partners and employees to the merger, he said. "We've had less than wonderful reaction from some of you. We are not deterred. We feel this is right for our customers and therefore right for our business."

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