Background

• Natural language analyst Gary Hendrix is credited with founding Symantec in 1982, using a National Science Foundation grant. Intent on working on projects centered in artificial intelligence, he hired a team of natural language processing researchers from Stanford University as the company's first employees. When the grant ran out and fruition of the projects proved much harder than expected, a computer software start-up named C&E Software acquired Symantec in 1984. Eventually, Symantec released the PC-compatible database program Q&A in 1985, marking the company's new focus on computer software.
  
  

Products

• Symantec is best known for its Norton software brand. Products from this line-up include the aptly titled Norton AntiVirus, which protects personal computers from malicious software, or malware; and the all-in-one Norton 360 security suite. Although Symantec garners a lot of revenue from the Norton software family, most of its profits actually come from designing enterprise software geared toward businesses. Symantec specializes not only in security, but also storage and backup, PC tune-up, project management and systems management solutions.
  
  

Acquisitions

• Since its early days, Symantec has made several acquisitions, all of which have contributed to its growth. It began in 1987 with the acquisition of Breakthrough Software, responsible for developing the project management program Time Line. Other notable acquisitions included the utilities software manufacturer Peter Norton Computing Inc. in 1990 --- the origin of the company's Norton brand; Contact Software International Inc. in 1993, which produced the popular Act!, a contact-management application; and the security software firm Sygate in 2005.
  
  

Financial Status

• Today, Symantec has more than 17,500 people employed in over 40 countries. According to its 2010 annual shareholders meeting, the company had a revenue of $5.9 billion, with an operating income of $933 million, a net income of $714 million, $11.2 billion in total assets and $4.5 billion in total equity.