Gen Digital Gen Digital Inc. (formerly Symantec Corporation and NortonLifeLock) is a multinational software company co-headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and Prague, Czech Republic. The company provides cybersecurity software and services. Gen is a Fortune 50 ...

, formerly known as Symantec and NortonLifeLock, is a multinational

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

company founded on March 1, 1982. It is an

international corporation A multinational company (MNC), also referred to as a multinational enterprise (MNE), a transnational enterprise (TNE), a transnational corporation (TNC), an international corporation or a stateless corporation with subtle but contrasting senses, i ...

that specializes in selling

security Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social ...

and

information management Information management (IM) concerns a cycle of organizational activity: the acquisition of information from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that information to those who need it, and its ultimate disposal throug ...

software. Gary Hendrix founded the company in 1982 with the help of a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

grant. Symantec was originally focused on

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

-related projects, and Hendrix hired several

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

researchers as the company's first employees. After the company's

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

in 1989, Hendrix left the company in 1991 and moved to

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...

. The company has acquired 57 companies, purchased stakes in 2 firms, and divested 26 companies, in which parts of the company are sold to another company. Of the companies that Symantec has acquired, 50 were based in the United States. Symantec has not released the financial details for most of these mergers and acquisitions. Symantec's first acquisition was C&E Software on January 1, 1984, and the founder of C&E Software,

Gordon Eubanks Gordon Edwin Eubanks, Jr. (born November 7, 1946) is an American microcomputer industry pioneer who worked with Gary Kildall in the early days of Digital Research (DRI). Eubanks attended Oklahoma State University, where he was involved as a me ...

, became the new

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

of Symantec. The company has made five acquisitions with a value greater than $1 billion:

LifeLock LifeLock Inc. is an American identity theft protection company based in Tempe, Arizona. LifeLock's system monitors for identity theft, the use of personal information, and credit score changes. LifeLock was acquired by computer security compan ...

was acquired on Feb 9, 2017 for $2.3 billion,

Blue Coat Systems __FORCETOC__ Blue Coat Systems, Inc., was a company that provided hardware, software, and services designed for cybersecurity and network management. In 2016, it was acquired by and folded into Symantec. In 2019 was, as part of Symantec Enterpris ...

was acquired on Aug 1, 2016 for $4.65 billion,

VeriSign Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the , , and gener ...

was acquired on May 19, 2010 for $1.250 billion,

Altiris Altiris Inc. is a subsidiary of Symantec specializing in service-oriented management software which allows organizations to manage IT assets. They also provide software for web services, security, and systems management products. Established in ...

was acquired on April 6, 2007 for $1.038 billion, and Symantec purchased

Veritas Software Veritas Technologies LLC. is an American international data management company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company has its origins in Tolerant Systems, founded in 1983 and later renamed Veritas Software. It specializes in stor ...

on July 2, 2005 for $13 billion. The deal with Veritas was Symantec's largest acquisition and made Symantec the fifth-largest software company in the world. Symantec made the most acquisitions in 2004 with six:

ON Technology ON Technology Corporation was a software company in the United States. It was formed in 1987 by Mitch Kapor after his departure from Lotus Software. The original plan of the business was to build an object-oriented PC desktop environment provid ...

Brightmail Brightmail Inc. was a San Francisco-based technology company focused on Anti-spam techniques, anti-spam Email filtering, filtering. Brightmail's system has a three-pronged approach to stopping spam, the Probe Network is a massive number of e-mail ...

, TurnTide,

@stake ATstake, Inc. was a computer security professional services company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded in 1999 by Battery Ventures (Tom Crotty, Sunil Dhaliwal, and Scott Tobin) and Ted Julian. Its initial core team of techno ...

LIRIC Associates LIRIC Associates was a computer security consultancy in the United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast ...

, and Platform Logic. The company divested its enterprise-security software business to

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

for $10.7 billion in 2019 and adopted the NortonLifeLock name. On November 7, 2022, NortonLifeLock rebranded to Gen Digital after completed its merger with Avast in last September.

Acquisitions

Investments

Stakes

Divestitures

Notes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gen Digital mergers and acquisitions Corporation-related lists Computing-related lists Lists of corporate mergers and acquisitions *