Imperfect company, good story

In a story fascinating for the face-saving admission from a high-up exec on the imperfection of product, CRN.com is running a revealing story entitled Symantec’s Parrish: “We’re not perfect.”

That’s “Parrish” as in “Symantec vice president of global channel sales and strategy Julie Parrish,” who admits that her firm has a lot to answer for after innumerable ERP and support systems problems in the wake of Symantec’s acquisition of Veritas about eight months ago. Resultant problems experienced by customers have elicited adjectives like “painful,” “ugly,” and “stupid” in CRN writer David Raikow’s piece alone. (And you can bet that those are only the most frequent terms on the printable end of the linguistic spectrum.)

The Symantec brain trust has blamed the problems on difficulties with integrating Veritas’ ERP system with Symantec’s own. The launch itself, according to “We’re not perfect,” had Symantec partners “forced to grapple with additional complexity in the ordering and licensing processes, problems tracking order status, and a variety of the sorts of bugs that accompany any significant launch.”

Said launch took place in early November. Parrish admitted that, as a result of the improper launch, the load on partner support systems “dramatically increased … sending customer care and technical support call volume skyrocketing by more than 1,000 percent,” thereby causing Symantec to go into “crisis mode.”

One redo of phone trunks, eight upgrades to the online partner portal, simplification of ordering processes, pricing changes, and augmentation to customer support later, Symantec may have righted itself, but there will most likely be continued damage to the firm’s reputation. Said one exec in the piece, “I were a partner in this situation, I would have to come back and have a positive experience many, many times before I was sure.”

As for Parrish herself, “Going forward, you’re probably not going to hear me talk a whole lot about really interesting things we’re doing with the partner program or nifty new promotions … The partners want me to go fix the ugly, un-sexy things around order entry, contract negotiation, licensing contracts and customer care issues.”

The Symantec/Veritas merger was first announced back in December 2004 in a transaction valued at some $13.5 billion. At that time, it was figured that approximately 75 percent of the revenue of the combined company would come from the enterprise business and 25 percent from the consumer business. The transaction was overwhelming approved – to the tune of about 95 percent – by shareholders of both companies in July 2005.

Symantec’s Parrish: “We’re not perfect” Can be read in full at CRN.com.