Peter Norton Computing agrees to be sold to Symantec in deal valued at $70 million; 'we had to get larger,' says software wiz Norton.

Peter Norton Computing agrees to be sold to Symantec in deal valued at $70 million

Peter Norton Computing Inc., the privately held $25 million (yearly sales) personal computer software firm in Santa Monica, will be acquired by Symantec Corp. of Cupertino in a deal valued at $70 million.

The agreement is partly in response to the software mega-distributors that have resulted from recent mergers. Two in particular -- Softsel-Microamerica of El Segundo and Ingram Micro D of Santa Ana -- have yearly revenues of more than $1 billion each.

As computer products distribution channels grow, so must the software companies that serve them, explained Peter Norton, chairman of Norton Computing.

"For us to get attention, we had to get larger," said Norton. Norton Computing had 1989 revenues of about $25 million, which is "nothing to be ashamed of." They are the result of an average yearly growth rate of 60 percent, said Norton.

By merging into Symantec, a publicly held, $40 million (1989 sales) company, Norton gains sales support and the ability to develop software for all types of computers, Norton said.

Norton Computing is famous for its utilities software -- software that recovers lost files and allow users to diagnose hard disk errors that can lead to computer malfunction. Symantec also sells utilities programs as well as word-processing and spreadsheet software.

Both companies have received numerous awards and recognition from various personal computer magazines, although Norton Computing has won recognition from its peer group, the Software Publishers Association. Last year, at an Academy Awards-like event of the association, Norton Computing received the Best Utility and Best Technical Achievement awards.

Norton said he expects sales this year will reach between $35 million and $45 million -- which could exceed the sales of Symantec.

A strong international presence is one of Norton Computing's attractions, said Norton, as it has offices in England and Italy and distributors in Australia, Scandinavia and Europe. In the Soviet Union, the Norton Utilities software is the most highly pirated software in a country that does not yet protect intellectual property rights, according to a spokesman for the Software Publishers' Association.

"I attended the first Soviet bloc [computer] conference as a guest," acknowledged Norton. "They were busy showing [computers operating] my pirated software. . ."

Norton began his software career in the late 1970s after he was laid off during an aerospace industry cutback. He took up computer programming to make ends meet and one day he accidently erased a file. Rather than re-enter the data, as most would have, he decided to write a program to recover the information from the disk. His friends were delighted with the programs and he developed a group of utility programs that he sold -- one at a time -- to user groups. In 1982, he founded Peter Norton Computing Inc.

In April, 1989, he handed over his CEO post to Ronald Posner, a former Ashton-Tate executive who under the merger agreement would become a director of Symantec.

Norton would also be a director of Symantec, while Norton Computing would remain at its Santa Monica headquarters under the agreement.