During the past two decades, the cybersecurity technology landscape has become astoundingly vast, numbering thousands of companies around the world. Throughout that time, two of the companies that have been at the center of that ecosystem have been Symantec and McAfee. This pair of industry bedrocks pioneered and refined many of the security capabilities that remain fundamental today, and their brands have become synonymous with security.
Today, their halcyon days have long faded. After struggling to adapt to change and overcome adversity for more than a decade, both companies are now charting new paths. But the ramifications have triggered seismic shifts in the vendor landscape, signaling what may be the start of the cybersecurity industry's next era.
Despite successful endpoint and identity businesses, Symantec has sought to reinvent itself for most of this century with little success. Its 2005 merger with Veritas seemed to create a cybersecurity software-hardware powerhouse, but the synergies never developed; Symantec divested Veritas a decade later.
Symantec then hoped the acquisitions of web-proxy giant Blue Coat Systems in 2016 and consumer anti-fraud specialist LifeLock just months later would provide an infusion of both technology and revenue. But when Symantec finally seemed to be turning things around, Symantec's brash CEO Greg Clark and his former Blue Coat management team found themselves in a series of scandals, including improper revenue recognition, a subsequent shareholder lawsuit, and alleged unethical executive behavior. In May, Clark stepped down, Symantec had its sixth CEO in 10 years, and key shareholders had had enough.
When Richard Hill, a noted corporate teardown artist, was appointed as Clark's successor, it was only a matter of time before Symantec ..
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