ESG review of Symantec/MessageLabs acquisition

Over at the Enterprise Strategy Group’s blog site there’s a great new video blog from Jon Oltsik about the Symantec and MessageLabs acquisition announcement. I’ve embedded the video below:

From my perspective, Jon was dead on about some of the goals we have with Symantec Protection Network:

• Supplementing a product based world: while Symantec has always had an extremely strong set of offerings for on premise solutions, we believe that service based delivery of our technologies is critical path for the future for us and our customers.
• Reduced acquisition/operating costs: I’ll refrain from using the “now, more than ever” form of this argument, but I think we can all agree that providing solutions that are less expensive to acquire and maintain is a worthwhile endeavor. By building a shared platform for our services, we hope to make it easier and cheaper for our customers, no matter what service they may need at a given time.
• Provide a complete portfolio: While I can’t say we’ll be able to serve every need of a small business (for example, I don’t think we’re going to provide online business card ordering), we do intend to provide as many of the information and asset protection services needed by our SMB customers and partners as possible. By adding a strong player like MessageLabs to the team, we continue to execute on that plan.

So thanks for the overview Jon, and I hope we can give you more interesting material in the future!

As an aside, I think the format of the talk is great, and reminiscent of the Steve Jobs “Chalk talk” videos making the rounds recently: