Shoring up rumors on the matter from earlier in the week, Symantec has confirmed plans to split into two independent, publicly traded companies. One will focus on information management while the other will concentrate on Symantec's bread and butter: security.
In a press release on the matter, the company said its decision to pursue a separation follows an extensive business review of their strategy and operational structure.
Michael A. Brown, Symantec president and CEO, said separating Symantec into two, independent publicly traded companies will provide each business the flexibility and focus to drive growth and enhance shareholder value.
His remarks echo what we've heard from others that have announced plans to split in recent memory.
Symantec becomes the third major technology company to announce a split in less than two weeks. On September 30, eBay Inc. revealed plans to split PayPal off with each becoming its own publicly traded company in 2015.
Less than a week later on October 6, HP said it would break up into two companies. HP Inc. will handle the company's consumer PC and printing business while Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would be in charge of servers, storage, networking, converged systems, services and software as well as its OpenStack Helion cloud platform.
Symantec's information management business generated revenue of $2.5 billion in fiscal year 2014 while the security division was responsible for bringing in $4.2 billion in revenue during the same period of time.
Symantec expects the spinoff to be complete by the end of 2015.