I attended a day-long set of presentations at Symantec last Wednesday. The topic: innovation in its research labs. It was somewhat interesting, since they are still playing the "storage and security synergy" game a bit. I almost wish they would just buy a systems management company so they can create separate lines of business along the same lines as CA or IBM.

Here are a few things I said to Red Herring:

Pete Lindstrom, research director at Spire Security, a security-focused market research and analysis firm, agreed with this assessment. A big security firm like Symantec faces the challenge of maintaining its reputation as a technology leader and a strong in-house research team is a critical part of that equation, he said.

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“Symantec wants to demonstrate that they have strong technical talent in-house,” said Mr. Lindstrom. “But I am not sure how far they will be successful.”

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“Microsoft does a great job of in-house research,” said Mr. Lindstrom. “They have a do-it-yourself attitude. But Symantec has so far gone and acquired something that it has found interesting rather than creating it themselves.”

Here is what I told Symantec: First, that demonstration innovation in security is tough because there are so many new startups with interesting ideas. The database security product that they demonstrated (and has been reported on in a couple of places) is plenty viable, but their are at least 5 other startups in that space currently shipping product.

Second, it is fine for a company like Symantec not to be innovative, but simply to be able to provide a full set of security solutions to their customers when they need them. They are serving the mainstream market, not the early adopters.

Third, if they really want to be seen as innovative, they should tear up the NDAs that we analysts all signed, open up their entire research labs, and let us talk about anything that is interesting. The point of the Microsoft comment was simply that they publish a lot of research, and I find it pretty interesting stuff.