Vision 2011: Symantec happy to be Intel partner, despite McAfee rivalry

BARCELONA: Symantec will continue to team up with Intel on security products for "years and years" to come, despite the $8bn acquisition of arch rival McAfee earlier this year, chief executive Enrique Salem has claimed.

Speaking to press after his keynote, Salem said that the partnership will last for the "foreseeable future" on projects such as Intel's anti-theft technology, which features Symantec's PGP Whole Disk Encryption.

"Intel continues to come to our events and sees Symantec as an important partner because we're the largest security vendor in the world and also do storage and back-up and recovery," he said. "If we can help them sell more silicon they'll always work with us."

Symantec and McAfee remain comfortably clear of the pack in the pure-play security vendor market, which features Trend Micro and Kaspersky Lab, but are nonetheless fierce rivals.

However, Salem argued that Intel has done Symantec a favour in "defocusing" its rival, pointing to the recent departures of chief executive Dave DeWalt and chief technology officer George Kurtz, and the defection of McAfee's director of security strategy, Greg Day, to become security chief technology officer at Symantec in EMEA.

"It's almost the best thing that could have happened," Salem said of the Intel acquisition.

"It took a focused competition and merged it with a silicon company which had to take time competing with ARM [on chips] and not on competing with Symantec [on security]."

Salem also stated his aim to repeat Symantec's success in dominating market share in the backup and anti-virus industries in the cloud, mobile and virtual security spaces.