Creating competitive advantage by realising customers’ unmet and under-served needs is the goal of any progressive business. But you cannot achieve that in any meaningful way, unless you have a strategy that turns those customers into long-term, loyal and committed ones. In other words, believers in the solutions you design and offer them.
It is these principles that Symantec adheres to and has embraced in its 2013 Strategic Direction Plan, focused on three critical areas also defined as the 'Peaks' against which 'right for the customer' offerings are designed:
- User Productivity & Protection
- Information Security
- Information Management: Availability & Scalability.
Importantly, this strategy has not emerged from any ‘deep bunker’ thinking, but from constant engagement with, and feedback from, customers and partners on precisely why they have opted for Symantec’s solutions and what critical challenges they solve for their business. From these engagements, Symantec has been able to identify a number of those ‘unmet and under-served needs’ and, as a result, the three critical areas highlighted above have evolved to meet those requirements.
So what exactly have customers been telling us, in line with this? Where User Productivity & Protection is concerned, they are saying: “Make it simple for me to be productive and protected at home and at work.”
For Information Security, they are asking: “Keep my business safe and compliant.” For Information Management, it is all about: “Keep my business applications up and running.”
Symantec’s existing solutions portfolio maps onto those three focus areas through its core offerings and the intention is, of course, to develop these further going forward – but also to bring to market 10 new integrated, modular solutions over the next 6-24 months; new offerings that deliver an aggregation of capabilities across important customer needs.
What are we talking about exactly? Well, let’s take one of those higher-value new offerings – Mobile Workforce Productivity – and look at a real-world customer situation. If you talk to customers about their endpoint real estate, you will understand how this works. For example, one large pharmaceutical company’s real estate was made up of 6,000 PCs, 7,000 Macs, 15,000 iPads and more than 10,000 Android smartphones, as far as the CEO was aware.
What he was seeking was a solution that would enable his people to continue to use those devices, while at the same time protect his business. Being in the pharmaceutical industry, he also has a raft of regulations to deal with. To deliver what he needs today and manage his endpoint real estate, he would have to invest in a whole set of products, such as employee and corporate BYOD, enterprise applications and Cloud services. We’re probably talking about a dozen in total.
There is better way. Symantec provides a single offering that brings those capabilities together under one roof, delivering a holistic view of what is really happening across all of a customer’s endpoints, whether owned by the business or plugged into the network. And here’s where the real power of having Norton come in to the fold. Businesses want to be able to use their own devices and, by having Norton to provide the right levels of protection around that, it gives them the confidence to allow greater access rights to their environment.
But our higher-value offerings go way beyond this particular example – into a powerful Information Security Service that delivers visibility into, and comprehensive protection from, advanced threats, leveraging Symantec and third-party products.
And they also extend into the challenging world of Business Continuity, with a solution that brings high availability, performance and scalability for business applications in virtual, private cloud environments. This is typically where businesses require a whole array of deliverables – from clustering and replication to faster recovery – with all of their technology around this orchestrated and bound together from one source. For instance, if the system goes down, they want to ensure that the database goes down last and comes up first.
Rather than having to buy a whole raft of stand alone solutions – across applications, platforms and storage etc – they can use one business continuity solution to achieve all of these goals; which is what Symantec’s Business Continuity offering is really all about.
The strategy deilvers 'Right for Me' solutions that will address critical IT challenges of our customers allowing them to focus on what's important.