NortonLifeLock – An American company well known for Cybersecurity Services.
NortonLifeLock is a cybersecurity company that is empowering people by protecting their digital life. The company uses cutting-edge technology to build online security software to reduce the emerging rates of cyber threats. In 1982, Gary Hendrix founded the company which is now based in Arizona, US. NortonLifeLock is one of the Fortune 500 companies and in India, it has its presence in Pune, Chennai, and Bangalore. This year, NortonLifeLock made it into the Fast Company’s Annual List of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Since the origin of the company started almost forty years from now, let’s have a look into it.
Establishing Symantec Corporation
When Gary Hendrix founded the company back in 1982 it was known as Symantec. He founded the company with help of a National Science Foundation grant and he hired several natural language processing researchers as a few of his first employees. Symantec started building projects related to artificial intelligence but a couple of years later they realized the database system they developed could not be ported from DEC minicomputers to the PC.
Since after two years of working Symantec was without any product, another software company called C&E software. After the acquisition, the merged companies decided to keep the brand name Symantec. A new product was developed combining the file management and word processing program of C&E along with an advanced natural language query system that was developed by Gary. The final product was named Q&A and it was rolled out in November 1985.
The sales of Q&A started very slowly but after a successful advertising campaign by the advertising agency Elliott/Dickens, the company started coming on the radar. Next, the company started cutting its expenses and focusing on revenue growth which enabled the company to break even. This was one of the breakthroughs of Symantec as the revenue started growing substantially after this event.
Growth of the Company
In 1985, a new division of Symantec was formed which was named Turner Hall Publishing. This division was established to publish third-party software and to diversify the revenue of Symantec. Soon the second product of the company was developed which was a 256k RAM initially released to increase the memory of Q&A. In 1987, the company completed its first merger by acquiring Breakthrough Software followed by acquiring Peter Norton Computing in 1990. Even today, the consumer antivirus and data management utilities of Symantec are still released under the name of Norton. During the time of the merger, Symantec has released Symantec Antivirus for Macintosh and Symantec Utilities for the Macintosh in the market.
It was one year before acquiring Norton that the company started developing a DOS-based antivirus program because it thought the antivirus market was growing and a lot of new work was going on in this branch. The Norton antivirus was a big success as by the end of 1993 Norton product group revenues added up to 82% of total Symantec revenue. Though Symantec was also known for its development tools, the company exited that section of business due to strong new competitors gaining rapid market control.
Symantec in 21st Century
In the 21st century, Symantec’s share of the market increased dramatically as the company acquired Verisign’s Certificate Authority business. In 2013, Symantec went through a major corporate reorganization with the major goal of cost reduction and improving Symantec’s product line. In 2016, the company introduced a new product called the Symantec anomaly detection for automotive which was an ML-based software providing in-vehicle security analysis. The same year, the company intended to acquire LifeLock for $2.3 billion. A couple of years ago Broadcom announced that it would acquire Symantec for $10.7 billion. After the deal was closed the name of the company was changed to NortonLifeLock.
About the Founder
Gary Hendrix is a well-known American businessman who became largely famous after founding Symantec Corporation. Gary received his undergraduate education from the University of Texas and it was then he wrote several papers on robotics and planning. His quality work got him an opportunity to work at SRI international. After working at SRI for several years he left the company with a few of his colleagues to start a venture of their own. In the beginning, their first attempt was a total failure but eventually, Gary founded Symantec Corporation which is part of a bigger corporation today.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more