Symantec continues cloud investment in spite of poor Q3 results

Symantec has reported third quarter 2015 revenue of $1.64bn, a drop of 4% compared with the $1.70bn it reported for the same period in 2014.

The company plans to increase its focus on licence audits as a way to generate more revenue.

Michael Brown, president and CEO, said: "Cyber attacks continue to dominate the headlines, with more than 70% still occurring at the endpoint. By harnessing Symantec’s vast threat telemetry to deliver actionable insight, we continue to prevent attacks at hundreds of millions of enterprise and consumer endpoints."

To improve security research, he said Symantec had hired 65 people from Boeing division Narus to work on big data and machine-learning initiatives for unified security.

In a transcript of the earnings call posted on the Seeking Alpha financial site, Brown said: "We reached our fiscal year target for our renewals initiatives, with a greater focus on value selling and process improvement. In license compliance, we've ramped the team to conduct more than 3x the number of audits to date than we completed in fiscal year '14. In the fourth quarter, we expect to conduct more than 10x the number of fiscal year '14 audits."

He also discussed where the company’s advanced threat protection products fitted in with traditional networking equipment.

The company also reported capital expenditures of $101m, which Brown said was being used to build the company’s IT and cloud infrastructure.

He said revenue growth in the company’s information management business grew to 5% year-over-year, from 3% in the September quarter. Brown said this was driven by double-digit revenue growth in NetBackup software, NetBackup Appliances and Enterprise Vault.

"We continue to outpace the market, with 15% year-over-year revenue growth in NetBackup software," Brown said. Our NetBackup Appliances grew 22% year-over-year, driven by the October launch of our NetBackup 5330 Appliance, which delivers twice the performance and capacity of prior models, making the management of information even simpler and less expensive."

He said Veritas would deliver next-generation products designed for the hybrid cloud throughout the upcoming year.

In August the company announced it would separate the Norton brand in a bid to drive greater margins into the business. When the company splits, Veritas Technologies Corporation will be the name of the newly formed information management business.