Symantec To Acquire On Technology

Symantec To Acquire On Technology

ON Technology is Key Building Block to Symantec’s Enterprise Administration Business

CUPERTINO, Calif. and WALTHAM, Mass. – Oct. 27, 2003 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) and ON Technology Corp. (Nasdaq: ONTC) today announced that their boards of directors have approved the acquisition of ON Technology by Symantec in a cash transaction valued at approximately $100 million. ON Technology’s enterprise infrastructure management solutions will further strengthen Symantec’s existing enterprise administration business and provide an ideal complement to the company’s enterprise security business.

Under the terms of the agreement, ON Technology shareholders will receive $4 per share. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including ON Technology shareholder approval and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close by March 2004.

“ON Technology’s leading software distribution and configuration management capabilities will be a critical component to the end-to-end management system Symantec is establishing to help our customers build, manage, and protect their IT infrastructures,” said John G. Schwarz, Symantec president and chief operating officer. “In addition, the partnerships ON has to provide inventory and patch management are ideal complements to Symantec’s enterprise security portfolio, to help customers address the challenges of recognizing the holes in their IT environment and providing appropriate remediation.”

“Enterprise infrastructure management and enterprise security must be intrinsically linked to protect today’s networked environments against the evolving threat landscape,” said Robert L. Doretti, chairman, president and chief executive officer of ON Technology. “By joining forces with Symantec, we can provide customers with industry-leading management solutions that take advantage of the most comprehensive source of threat and vulnerability intelligence.”

ON Technology solutions provide centralized and unattended management – including auto-discovery, OS and application deployment, ongoing updates such as patches, and software usage and license management – for a range of computing platforms and devices. ON Technology’s existing extensible and standards based architecture allows existing Symantec Ghost users to automatically deploy Ghost images and configuration changes—along with application and security patches—from a single unified administration console.

ON Technology’s solutions automate OS migrations, software deployment, mobile and remote management, asset management, security and patch management and disaster recovery. It will play a significant role in augmenting Symantec's enterprise administration offerings. Organizations leverage the technology to significantly reduce IT costs, improve availability and reliability of business-critical applications and systems, and enhance both IT and end-user productivity.

About ON Technology Corporation
ON Technology empowers IT organizations and service providers to manage the full lifecycle of their computing systems over large-scale corporate networks. ON Technology’s solutions are used to rapidly and reliably deploy critical applications, operating systems, and content to desktops, mobile PCs, handhelds, servers, retail point-of-sale (POS) terminals and banking workstations. ON’s management solution has been chosen by more than 1,000 enterprises worldwide to manage in excess of 1.2 million networked computer systems. For more information visit ON Technology’s web site at www.on.com or call 800-767-6638.

About Symantec

Symantec, the world leader in Internet security technology, provides a broad range of content and network security software and appliance solutions to individuals, enterprises and service providers. The company is a leading provider of client, gateway and server security solutions for virus protection, firewall and virtual private network, vulnerability management, intrusion detection, Internet content and e-mail filtering, remote management technologies and security services to enterprises and service providers around the world. Symantec’s Norton brand of consumer security products is a leader in worldwide retail sales and industry awards. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has worldwide operations in 36 countries. For more information, please visit www.symantec.com.

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