Symantec’s President Out in Leadership Shake-up
Symantec‘s president and COO has unexpectedly resigned amid sudden changes in the cybersecurity giant’s leadership structure within enterprise security.
Michael Fey, who joined Symantec upon closing of its Blue Coat acquisition two years ago, has resigned as president and COO. He is credited with successfully leading enterprise security product and field integration.
Symantec’s Michael Fey
The leadership changes were announced late Thursday and Symantec wouldn’t provide any further comment.
Art Gilliland has been appointed executive vice president and general manager of enterprise products, and Marc Andrews will continue in his role as senior vice president of worldwide sales with expanded responsibilities. Both will report directly to Symantec’s now president and CEO Greg Clark.
Gilliland joined Symantec this month and previously served as president and CEO of Skyport Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2017. He brings more than 20 years of executive leadership experience to the company, having previously served as senior vice president and general manager of the its information security group.
He will oversee the enterprise security product and engineering teams, the security technology and response (STAR) research team and the enterprise security customer support organization.
Andrews played a pivotal operational role following Symantec’s acquisition of Blue Coat, and has served as senior vice president of enterprise security worldwide sales since 2016, leading the engagement with the company’s largest customers, transactions and partners. In addition, he integrated the Symantec and Blue Coat global sales teams, and has driven the rollout of the integrated cyber-defense platform strategy to the company’s global customer base.
| Here’s our list of channel people on the move in October. |
“The Blue Coat acquisition was a defining moment for Symantec, and we set an ambitious goal to transform our enterprise security segment with the vision of delivering an integrated cyber-defense platform to our customers,” Clark said. “As we position enterprise security for its next phase of growth and industry leadership, we are implementing an enhanced organizational structure that allows for greater scale on product development and sales generation, with two cybersecurity veterans reporting directly to me. I am very confident Symantec is well positioned to execute on our strategy to drive technology leadership by protecting consumers and enterprises from an increasing threat environment.”
The company is facing a shareholder lawsuit alleging it manipulated quarterly financial results, prompting big payouts for top executives, and the resulting investigation and fallout caused investors to lose money. The suit names Symantec along with Clark, CFO Nick Noviello and former accounting head Mark Garfield as defendants. It was filed by James Felix, a Symantec investor, on behalf of everyone who bought Symantec shares between May 11, 2017, and Aug. 2 of this year.
Clark became CEO of Symantec after it bought Blue Coat. The suit alleges that Clark and Noviello brought “Blue Coat’s unethical practices and ‘toxic culture’ with them to Symantec.”
Earlier this month, Symantec’s stock spiked after a report that Thoma Bravo had approached the company to express interest in acquiring it.
Toxic culture is right, I still work for Symantec in their Premium SEP offerings for large customers and it is horrific. We went from organized training with hand on skills labs and weeks of mentoring to a 2 day training video and throw new TAMS to the wolves. And by wolves I mean customers with serious needs and support issues that require in depth understanding and training on that they lack. So we end up loosing the contracts, then the new-hire who feels abandoned. Any customers that TAM had left then gets transferred to another new hire and the pattern goes on and on while the executives continue to blame support internally and cancel off employee benefits and sales blames support publicly .. it is a true death spiral. Last year all of our 69% profits over costs were taken and spent proping up other departments that have been in the negative for 8+ quarters.. yet every single support executive got a premium plus bonus…
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