John Thompson retiring as Symantec CEO

Symantec on Monday announced that chairman and CEO John Thompson is retiring, and Symantec's COO Enrique Salem has been named president and CEO. Thompson will remain chairman of the board and will join the Symantec board of directors.

This transition is expected to occur April 4, 2009. Thompson, 59 years old and a 10-year Symantec veteran, led the firm beyond its base strength as a consumer-focused anti-virus company through a broader enterprise-security strategy that entailed aggressively acquiring storage, management, and security firms to expand Symantec's portfolio and customer base.

[ In other IT business news this week, Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang also announced plans to step down. ]

Under Thompson's 10-year leadership, Symantec not only acquired storage firm Veritas in a multi-billion-dollar deal in 2005, but also more than two dozen security and management vendors over the period, including Altiris, AppStream, Relicore, BindView, Brightmail, and Vontu.
In a conference call with analysts, Thompson said he was satisfied with the outcome, which has pushed Symantec's revenues tenfold.

"Ten years is about the right time for a CEO," he said about his decision to retire, noting that a transition process to determine a new CEO had been worked on internally at Symantec for two years.

Salem, 43, has experience leading product groups at Symantec from 1990 to 1999, and returned to the company in 2004 after Symantec acquired Brightmail, where he was CEO. Salem also had stints at Oblix, acquired by Oracle, and Ask Jeeves.

When asked whether Symantec had looked at other CEO candidates outside of Symantec or other than Salem, Thompson replied the company had, but was convinced Salem was the right choice.

"Enrique has an extensive knowledge of our products and services," Thompson said, noting that Salem's familiarity with Symantec's customers and their requirements was a huge plus. He said Symantec had asked Salem to assume the post of COO earlier this year as part of the succession strategy.

Salem was reluctant to describe a set of specific goals he would undertake as CEO other than growing Symantec's business but did state that Symantec was open to making more acquisitions in the future.

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