- published: 08 Jan 2016
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Symantec Corporation /sɪˈmænˌtɛk/ (commonly known as Symantec) is an American technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States. The company produces software for security, storage, backup and availability - and offers professional services to support its software. Netcraft asseses Symantec (including subsidiaries) as the most-used certification authority. Symantec is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock-market index.
On October 9, 2014, Symantec declared that the company would split into two independent publicly traded companies by the end of 2015. One company would focus on security, the other on information management. The information-management business will use the name "Veritas Technologies", echoing the name of Veritas Software (which Symantec acquired in 2005).
The name Symantec represents a combination of the words "syntax" and "semantics".
Founded in 1982 by Gary Hendrix with a National Science Foundation grant, Symantec was originally focused on artificial intelligence-related projects, including a database program. Hendrix hired several Stanford University natural language processing researchers as the company's first employees, among them Barry Greenstein (professional poker player and developer of the word processor component within Q&A). Hendrix also hired Jerry Kaplan (entrepreneur and author) as a consultant to build the in-RAM database for Q&A.