http://www.symantec.com/press/2003/n030923.html

Strengthens SymantecÂ’s Offering in PC Active State Management

CUPERTINO, Calif. - Sept. 23, 2003 - Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire PowerQuest Corporation. The acquisition is intended to combine market-leading deployment, imaging, provisioning, storage management, and disaster recovery technologies into a new enterprise solution for managing, protecting and recovering servers, workstations, laptops and handhelds, called Active State Management. The acquisition, conditioned upon customary regulatory approvals and PowerQuest shareholder approval, is expected to close by the end of 2003.

"Active State Management is a critical component of the cradle-to-grave management system needed to effectively manage the creation, protection and recovery of servers, desktops, laptops and handhelds," said John Schwarz, Symantec president and chief operating officer. "As security becomes a significant factor in ongoing infrastructure management, the combination of security and imaging technologies, along with Symantec's strong channel presence, will be a powerful force in bringing our customers new IT management capabilities that leverage the convergence of systems and storage management."

"PowerQuest has pioneered the concept of Active State Management, an innovative way of using imaging technology to better build, protect and recover servers, workstations and laptops. The Active State Management architecture uses proven imaging and partitioning technologies as its foundation," said Paul Winn, PowerQuest president and CEO. "PowerQuest's key technologies, including virtual volume imaging and server provisioning complement Symantec's Ghost solutions. The combined company will be able to provide customers the solutions necessary to build, manage, and protect their IT infrastructures."

PowerQuest's industry-leading storage management products, services, and solutions enable an enterprise to effectively build, manage, and protect corporate data systems and their data. PowerQuest provides imaging and deployment, system migration, and management of system updates with its deploy solutions including PowerQuest V2i Builder and PowerQuest DeployCenter Library.

PowerQuest solutions including PowerQuest VolumeManager, PartitionMagic Professional, and ServerMagic allow enterprise customers to quickly add new storage, reconfigure existing storage, monitor and manage storage devices, and easily plan for the future. Enterprise organizations can quickly create backups without bringing servers offline, rapidly restore systems back to a specified point-in-time, and immediately recover individual files and folders without the inconvenience of traditional recovery methods using PowerQuest V2i Protector. PowerQuest V2i Protector complements Symantec's existing line of anti-virus products, and provides a second line of defense against computer viruses and worms.

In addition, PowerQuest offers a wide range of products to help OEMs and system builders reduce the time required to set up and configure new workstations, deploy software applications, or recover from a disaster. PowerQuest's personal products are designed to meet the data management and imaging needs of desktop computer users and include PartitionMagic, to create, resize, merge, or convert partitions without destroying data and DriveImage, imaging software for disaster recovery, backups, and system upgrades.

About PowerQuest

PowerQuest Corporation is a global provider of automated deployment and recovery solutions for corporations and individual users. Based on the company's Virtual Volume Imaging (V2i) technology and Active State Management (ASM) architecture, PowerQuest products and services simplify the management of storage through the technology lifecycle. PowerQuest products are available directly from the company and throughout a network of partners in more than 34 countries. More information is available at www.powerquest.com.

About Symantec

Symantec, the world leader in Internet security technology, provides a broad range of content and network security software and appliance solutions to individuals, enterprises and service providers. The company is a leading provider of client, gateway and server security solutions for virus protection, firewall and virtual private network, vulnerability management, intrusion detection, Internet content and e-mail filtering, remote management technologies and security services to enterprises and service providers around the world. Symantec's Norton brand of consumer security products is a leader in worldwide retail sales and industry awards. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has worldwide operations in 36 countries. For more information, please visit www.symantec.com.