Enrique Podcast

Hello and welcome to another Vision 2008 video podcast brought to you by Symantec. I'm your host, Wendell Davis, and I'm joined here this afternoon in the bloggers' lounge by Enrique Salem, Chief Operating Officer for Symantec Corporation. Enrique, thanks for taking time out of your schedule to stop by.

Absolutely, Wendell. It's good to be here.

Likewise. Well, glad to have you here as always. Hey, listen, let's start by talking a little bit about the event. Why don't you tell our listeners and our viewers out there about the significance of the Vision 2008 event. What does it mean for the Symantec brand and also for the standing of Symantec in the technology industry?

Yeah, ultimately Vision is our opportunity to share with the world everything that is going to be happening from Symantec over the next 12 to 24 months. So what we're trying to do is ultimately give people a perspective of what is going to shape the market. And we also use it as an opportunity to launch many of our new initiatives. So for example, launching things like VXVI, or the Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, launching things like our new data protection strategy, and helping our customers understand what they can count on Symantec doing to help them as they go out into the future. Right.

Now, we all know at Symantec there are 4 very core values that the company really operates by. There's innovation, trust, action, and customer-driven, of which you've taken on an initiative at Symantec called the Customer First Initiative. Care to talk about that program and sort of what, how it became, how it came about, and what the purpose and what your goals are for that?

When we talk about Customer First, what's important is we have to take care of our customers, and we have to pay attention to what matters to them. What matters to our customers is they want to work with Symantec, but they want it to be easy. They want to get great support. They want to make it easy to renew their licenses, to buy new licenses. They want great quality products. And this all came about because as we talked to our customers, they made it very clear They want us to be successful, but they expect us to do a great job of taking care of them. And so we've got a whole focused initiative that's including all 17,500 people at Symantec, where they're all involved in what are we doing to make sure our customers are happy working with Symantec.

As Chief Operating Officer, talk about some of your 12-month goals for the organization in general.

You know, when we look at our business, it's pretty straightforward. It starts with really two important things. One, let's make sure that we're doing a great job of driving customer loyalty. And two, let's outcompete, let's win in the marketplace. And so that means driving higher growth or more market share gains. And that is all about creating value for our customers. So what we talk about is how do we differentiate Symantec solutions from what's going on in the marketplace and really solve meaningful business problems for our customers.

And for the attendees that are here this week, the, the customers and just general attendees, what are some of the key messages you really want them to walk away with this week?

I think what they should hear is that Symantec is there to help them as they try to virtualize their environment, whether it be in the data center or at the endpoint. It's also important to know that we can help them with managing their information, both securing and managing their information. That is what Symantec is all about, and if we're doing a good job, they trust Symantec will help them both to virtualize and protect their information.

Enrique Salem, Chief Operating Officer at Symantec Corporation. Enrique, thanks again for your time and thanks for stopping by the Blogger's Lounge this morning. And for more videos, podcasts, and blogs from the Vision 2008 event, visit vision.symantec.com. Thank you for watching.