10 CIO Digest July 2009

EXECUTIVE Q&A

DEfInIng, AlIgnIng, AnD EXECUTIng THE

COrpOrate

Corporate strategy can mean many different things and, according to some, has been poorly defined. Ken Berryman, who assumed the position of senior vice president of strategy at Symantec in february this year, is busy defining Symantec’s strategy—from its generation, to its facilitation, to its execution.

Berryman is chartered with mergers and acquisitions, strategic investments, post-acquisition integration, as well as several emerging businesses that include both early stage ventures and high-growth, standalone businesses in dynamic new markets such as endpoint virtualization.

Prior to his new role overseeing corporate strategy, Berryman led product develop-ment for the netBackup product platform and was responsible for the netBackup, PureDisk, and Backup Reporter product lines. With a master’s and doctorate in physics from Stanford University and a bachelor’s in physics from Harvard University, he made a transition from research and academia to the world of business at McKinsey & Company where he was a partner in the Silicon Valley office and led the company’s north American software practice for several years.

The editor in chief of CIO Digest, Patrick Spencer, had an opportunity to speak with Berryman about his new assignment. Their conversation touched on how Berryman’s various prior experiences provide him with a unique perspective on strategy, and how he is aligning with the three priorities spelled out by Symantec President and CEO Enrique Salem—security, next-generation data protection, and Software-as-a-Service. They also discussed Symantec’s methodological approach to acquisitions, how acquired companies are integrated into Symantec’s technology portfolio and business operations, and the importance of gathering input from customers, partners, the investment community, and employees. M

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Interview with patrick e. Spencer

podcastCheck out the Executive Spotlight

Podcast with Ken Berryman go.symantec.com/berryman

Varied Experiences Provide Unique Management lens

Strategy

symantec.com/ciodigest 11

patrICK: Ken, congratulations on your new appointment as senior vice president of strategy. What was your role at McKinsey and Company? How has your role at Symantec evolved into your current assignment?

Ken: I’ve had the opportunity to serve in a number of fantastic roles at Symantec. Before join-ing Symantec, I spent 10 years at McKinsey, working from associate through partner. My final role was running McKinsey’s software prac-tice, where I worked with various software companies to help them with both strategy and operations—

great preparation for my first as-signment at Symantec running the NetBackup product group. I then assumed charge of our endpoint vir-tualization business before becom-ing senior vice president of strategy.

patrICK: You have some impressive credentials. How did your academic training prepare you for your roles at McKinsey & Company and now Symantec?

Ken: My degrees are actually all in hard science; they’re in physics. I’ve been asked during my career “how someone with a background

in physics became a consultant and ended up becoming a leader in a software company?” At first glance, I would say it’s somewhat surpris-ing. However, the transition makes more sense when you compare the disciplines: physics is all about understanding the unknown and answering tough, thorny ques-tions, confronting problems and finding ways to solve those in new, innovative ways. This is the same approach that I’ve taken in previous positions and now in my current role. Technology constantly evolves, the market rapidly evolves, and we’re confronting tough competi-tors. So, while I don’t use a lot of my academic training in physics, I certainly draw upon the problem-solving skills and the need to break challenges down into pieces and then solve them.

patrICK: Corporate strategy can mean several different things. Indeed, some recent articles on the subject conclude that the job of chief strategy officer is largely poorly defined. The charter for corporate strategy ranges from the generation of corporate strat-egy, to the facilitation and execution of corporate strategy. Can you speak to the different philosophical approaches behind each of these and where you see your current role fitting?

Ken: Strategy is really all about what a company should and should not do. It’s about making decisions that are fundamental to the path of success: what markets to move into, how to respond to competitive actions, what products to build, what solutions to deliver and how to deliver them. There are different components on developing a successful strategy and how to execute it: understanding what is happening in the market and where IT organizations are purchas-ing software and services and what capabilities they are seeking. This is an iterative process that requires significant interaction with other executives within the company. Regardless, at the end of the day,

StrategyKen Berryman, Senior Vice

president of Strategy, Symantec

12 CIO Digest July 2009

strategy without execution doesn’t get a company very far.

patrICK: greg Hughes, who is cur-rently the group president for the en-terprise product group at Symantec, served as the chief strategy officer prior to your appointment. What are some of the key initiatives greg spear-headed and how did he help lay the groundwork for your new assignment?

Ken: Greg laid a foundation for future success by looking at our

overall product portfolio, under-standing how the different product families fit together. The output was an organizational structure not only focused on our core strengths but one that positions the company to leverage new market opportunities such as Software-as-a-Service, con-sumerization of IT, and virtualiza-tion. One of the wonderful aspects of my current role is the high degree of collaboration, not just with the enterprise product group or the consumer product group, but re-ally with every functional area of the company. We only succeed in executing on our strategy if we are aligned behind a common set of goals. In regards to Greg and the enterprise product group, we work most closely on two areas: acquisi-tions and competitive and market intelligence.

patrICK: Symantec’s new President and CEO, Enrique Salem, has spelled out some new areas of focus for the company as it heads into fY10—secu-

rity, next generation data protection, and Software-as-a-Service. How will you and your team play a role in driv-ing these initiatives?

Ken: We’re going to do this at a couple of levels. The first is just communicating the way in which this fits into our overall strategy: Symantec’ s strategy is to help customers secure and manage their information-driven world—the three priorities Enrique has set for FY10 are natural implications

of that strategy. The second is to drive appropriate measurements—market share, customer loyalty, and employee loyalty.

patrICK: Enrique has also spoken about some operational priorities—innovation, ease of doing business, and improvement of integration efforts around various products that have been acquired over the last couple of years. How does your team feed into these particular initiatives?

Ken: One of the things that we’ve realized as a management team is that we need to make sure we get continually better at executing on bringing together the vision that we all believe in, helping custom-ers to secure and manage their information. In order to do so, we develop a number of products internally, and also acquire a num-ber of companies externally. All of these pieces must fit together and be integrated. The actions we have taken on the consumer

side to have a very focused set of offerings, such as Norton 360, and the initiatives we’re now making on the enterprise side to have more focused security suites, are examples of this focus. These are important ingredients in demon-strating to customers that we have an integrated product strategy. We’ll continue to define what we need to change in order to address our customers’ requirements and also to make it easier to do business with Symantec.

patrICK: Symantec is an acquisi-tive company. What are some of the factors that you and your team take into consideration when identifying potential acquisition targets?

Ken: We want to acquire com-panies that have technology that is a natural fit with the businesses that we want to be in or the businesses that we are already in, and that will give us the ability to serve the market in new ways. As a result, many of our acquisitions fall into the category of natural product fits with our existing portfolio such as Mi5 Networks, AppStream, and nSuite Technologies. Other acquisitions such as MessageLabs, PC Tools, or SwapDrive are focused on giving us new ways to approach a market, new capabilities that support our existing businesses while helping us to have a new and differentiated way to approach our customers with offerings that drive value for them.

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“at the end of the day, strategy without execution doesn’t get a company very far.”

– Ken Berryman, Senior Vice President of Strategy, Symantec

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Once we’ve identified an acquisi-tion target, we look at the team and the technology and evaluate the overall company. However, the key criteria is whether it fits with our overall strategy and current product portfolio, and if it gives us the ability to serve the needs of our customers better.

patrICK: Once an acquisition takes place, what are some of the processes your team oversees in order to make sure the acquisition is successfully integrated into Symantec—both short term and long term?

Ken: There is a lot of work in-volved in acquiring even a very small company and integrating it into the larger Symantec portfolio and operations. The announce-ment of an acquisition is simply the tip of the iceberg. My acquisi-tion integration team is respon-sible for not only making sure the technology lands in the right place but that all of the back-office systems work. The employees must also understand how to work inside of Symantec and how they can contribute to the larger value of Symantec. There are scores of people inside of Symantec in every function who make integra-tion successful; we simply help to coordinate those actions across the company.

patrICK: What can the investment community, Symantec customers, and Symantec partners expect to see from you and your team over the next year or two? What are some of the new initiatives you plan to spearhead?

Ken: There are really three sig-nificant trends taking place across the IT landscape, and we want the investment community to under-stand Symantec’s role in each one. The first is consolidation. As the IT world continues to consolidate, focusing on information across those consolidating stacks, if you will, becomes increasingly impor-

patrICK: Endpoint virtualization is one area you’ve been lead-ing over the past year. What has Symantec accomplished in that space and what should we expect in the coming year?

Ken: Virtualization remains one of those

technology trends that is “unstoppable”

and is on the minds of many customers,

in all of its different forms and flavors.

Virtualization affects everything in the IT

environment from servers, to storage, to

endpoints. from an endpoint perspective,

we have been able to bring together a set

of products into the Symantec Endpoint

Virtualization Suite, which was launched

earlier this year. This suite has estab-

lished Symantec as an important player

in the endpoint virtualization space. The

notion that information and applications

aren’t attached to a physical device but

can be separated from that device and

able to move with the user is intrinsi-

cally tied to our strategy of securing and

managing information.

With the Symantec Endpoint Virtu-

alization Suite, we can help customers

create a workspace that is independent

from the underlying infrastructure. We

will continue to offer additional solutions

in this area such as application virtualiza-

tion, application streaming, and desktop

virtualization. We embrace the idea that

information is what matters and the

underlying hardware technology does

not. And who better to help secure and

manage information than Symantec?

patrICK: Healthcare is an emerg-ing focus for Symantec, with some new offerings coming later this year. What has Symantec done in this space so far and where is the program headed?

Ken: Healthcare is the focus of one of

our emerging businesses, and we’re

very excited about the opportunities.

Our initial target is solving a critical

problem: helping hospitals, patients, and

doctors manage the explosion of medical

information. With ever greater need for

such information, there are significant

demands on IT staff and exponential

growth in storage costs.

We’re developing a solution that will

provide a consolidated, centralized, and

secure repository for medical information

that will eliminate the operational cost

and complexity of managing this data

while enabling healthcare providers to

focus on providing better care to their pa-

tients. It is an opportunity that has been

made even more relevant by the stimulus

dollars that have been directed towards

healthcare by the Obama administration.

This is a spectacular example of

leveraging Symantec technologies

such as storage management to take

advantage of a new market opportunity.

There is huge interest in the program.

Indeed, we’ve had so much interest from

our healthcare customers that we had to

limit the number of initial participants,

although we will open it up to additional

customers later in the year.

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the Strategy of Launching new Businesses

tant. The second is the shift to the cloud, from private to public cloud and all of the associated tech-nologies such as virtualization and Software-as-as-Service. Our Mes-sageLabs acquisition will enable us to move into more of these types of offerings. The third is something we’ve described as the consumer-ization of IT; the enterprise is in-creasingly becoming an extension of what consumers use themselves and giving them the freedom of choice in the work environment—

whether it is social networking applications or personal laptops and mobile devices. The good news is that all three of these trends are good for Symantec, because they reinforce the importance of our strategy to enable customers to se-cure and manage their information-driven world. n

Patrick E. Spencer (Ph.D.) is the editor in chief for CIO Digest and the author of a book and various articles and reviews published by Continuum Books and Sage Publications, among others.