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Gary Bloom, current president and vice chairman of Symantec and former CEO of Veritas Software, has announced that he will walk away from Symantec by the end of March.
Symantec officials said Jan. 23 that Blooms role as president will not be filled at this time. In addition, the lines of business currently reporting to Bloom will instead report directly to Symantec CEO John Thompson. As part of his decision to resign from Symantec, Bloom will also step down from his position as vice chairman of the board of directors.
Bloom joined the ranks of Symantec when the security provider bought Veritas, a storage software and backup provider, for $13.5 billion in December 2004. The mega-merger officially closed in June 2005.
Staunchly battling early criticism from Wall Street about the Symantec and Veritas marriage, Bloom often stood as the face of Veritas next to Thompson in pushing the promise, strategy, and merits of tightly integrating security and storage software technology together.
Now just one year later he will soon join former Symantec executive John Schwarz— who left Symantec to assume the CEO mantel at Business Objects last year—as an ex-president of Symantec.
“The strength of the management team at Symantec gives me comfort in deciding to use this transition to take a break after almost 25 years in the high technology industry,” Bloom said in a statement. “I still firmly believe in the strategic rationale for bringing Symantec and Veritas together.”
Before coming to Symantec, Bloom served as the CEO of Veritas from 2000 and as chairman since 2002. Under his watch, the company grew its significant market share in the data backup software area and expanded its role in other storage areas such as storage management, replication and virtualization.