Kiwi spirit appeals to US workers

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

American software manufacturer Symantec may move up to ten US jobs to Auckland as part of an expansion of its Ghost development facility.

At present the technical staff working on the New Zealand-developed disk-cloning package are split between Symantec's Auckland office and a smaller facility near Portland, Oregon.

But Symantec has now secured a second floor of the building it shares with Otago University on Queen St, to accommodate future expansion, including a possible consolidation of the two development teams.

"We are not sure, but any consolidation there is will be moving jobs or people from the States to here," said Symantec vice-president Joe Wang.

Mr Wang, who runs Symantec's enterprise administration unit, which is responsible for Ghost, said some of the product's senior developers as well as its product manager had already shifted here from the US.

"People like to come here - in Portland it rains for six months of the year," he joked.

Symantec acquired Ghost three years ago when it paid $US29 million ($67.5 million) for the assets of New Zealander Murray Haszard's company, Binary Research. At the time it kept about ten programmers on.

The original Ghost allowed the contents of a disk to be saved in compressed form, to be either resurrected later on the same Machine or recreated on a different computer.

Ghost was popular with libraries and training centres, which used it to reset PCs to a known configuration at the end of each day, as well as computer manufacturers who used it to pre-configure hardware.

As Symantec has since introduced new versions of Ghost that allow multiple remote installations and upgrades of software, the product has appealed more to the corporate market, and it now enjoys a 65 per cent market share of software of its type.

Mr Wang said the original development team had grown to almost 40, and Symantec had now ruled out a previously considered option of moving this team back to the US.

"If we did that we would lose at least half of our people here. We can't afford to do that."

Symantec does not release revenue figures for individual products, but Mr Wang said Ghost's revenue fluctuated between a third and a half of the value of sales of another program in the enterprise administration unit, pcAnywhere. As this business unit accounts for almost 25 per cent of Symantec's $US826 million annual revenue, that would place Ghost as being worth between $US50 million and $US65 million a year.

Apart from bringing in revenue, Ghost is also helping Symantec to make sales of its mainstay anti-virus software.

Mr Wang said anti-virus software had penetrated the corporate market to the extent that new sales could only come by taking market share from competitors.

"The biggest obstacle to this is uninstalling a customer's existing anti-virus software.

"Some large corporations say it costs them more to do this than they are paying us for our software. This is where Ghost comes in - it can be used to uninstall software as an uninstall is just like an install in reverse."

The Auckland Ghost team is Symantec's only software development centre outside of the US. Mr Wang said the internet had helped the company to overcome the distance.

"We communicate easily enough - we e-mail every day and we occasionally use video-conferencing. Of course, there are some things about face-to-face meetings that can never be replaced.

For example, you miss being able to see someone in the corridor and say: 'Hey, you were working late last night. What was the problem?"'

Mr Wang said he expected the Auckland development team to continue the growth of the last three years, during which it almost doubled staff numbers every year.

The team were now working on Ghost version 7.

"If you see the lights burning late over the next couple of months, that's what we are working on."

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