Top five acquisition U-turns that burned the channel

Doug Woodburn
clock • 7 min read

SonicWall's CEO this week opened up on the issues its brief ownership by Dell caused partners. But it's not the only example of an acquisition volte-face by a large vendor causing pain for the channel

3) Symantec and Veritas

Symantec might have taken a decade to decide its $13.5bn acquisition of Veritas was a mistake, but partners were burned nevertheless as a result of its slow-motion U-turn.

Having argued that security and storage are best delivered together when it acquired Veritas in 2005, Symantec had evidently changed its mind by 2015, when it announced it was offloading the information management brand for $8bn.

A further $1bn was knocked off the price by Carlyle Group ahead of the deal closing last February, underlining the extent to which Symantec had failed to build on Veritas' brand value.

As part of the split, Veritas cut the number of ERP applications it ran from five to one, cut the number of SKUs available by 40 per cent and overhauled its price lists.

At the time of its 2015 partner conference, Brett Shirk, Veritas' executive vice president for worldwide sales, described the process as "disentangling 10 years of entanglement with Symantec" and apologised to partners.

"As part of Symantec we had five different ERP applications and 8,000 customisations," he said. "We've taken that down to one ERP with 800 customisations. You can imagine the amount of business process changes as a result of [moving from] significant complexity to simplicity. But there's a lot of complexity in going from complex to simple!"

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