Symantec announced on Tuesday that it sold its Veritas division to The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm based out of Washington DC, for $8 billion.
Last fall, the computer security company announced it would be splitting into two separate publicly traded companies. The first, Symantec, would be focused on security, and the second, Veritas, would be focused on information management.
The split was never officially completed. However, Symantec got a nice return, allowing them to concentrate on their core security business. The company plans to shift focus to the cloud and a recurring subscription based business. The company has struggled to shift their focus to subscriptions from one-time license sales.
“The sale allows Symantec to double down on their core by buying them time to deal with the cloud revenue conversion,” R Ray Wang, Founder at Constellation Research, told TechCrunch.
The sale allows Symantec to double down on their core by buying them time to deal with the cloud revenue conversion.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Symantec has been struggling for the past few years. In an effort to combat declining revenue, the company fired its second chief executive last Spring.
On Tuesday the company reported double-digit declines in revenue and profit for the first quarter, which ended on July 3. However, the enterprise-security portion of their company has grown for the first time in two years.
Symantec expects a $6.3 billion cash proceed from the sale of Veritas, which provides backup and recovery, disaster recovery, storage management, and archiving products.
The deal with Carlyle is expected to close by January 1, 2016.
In July, Symantec reported that while spam was on the decline, malware was on the rise as a serious threat to email users.
