Amid Corporate Reorganization, Symantec Names Five New Execs

Last month, security software company Symantec confirmed a significant round of layoffs, amounting to about eight percent of its total headcount.

Today it starting adding back to that headcount with the naming of five new senior executives, including a chief marketing officer, a chief communications officer, a chief security officer and two senior VPs.

Announced in a corporate blog post earlier today, the five new execs are being brought on to execute a company-wide shift in direction instituted by Steve Bennett, Symantec's new CEO, who joined the company a year ago.

The new hires are:

• CMO Manny Kostas, a former SVP of marketing and strategy at Hewlett-Packard, who left after a shake-up last year. He has been working for Polycom since October.
  
• CCO Colleen Lacter, a veteran of PR agency Waggener Edstrom (better known as Microsoft's PR agency). She was involved in many significant product launches, including Windows 95, Internet Explorer, MSN and Bing.
• CSO Julie Talbot-Hubbard, previously chief information security officer at Ohio State University.
• Matt Lynch will be SVP for eBusiness. He was most recently COO at Amazon-owned IMBD.com. Stephen McHenry will be SVP for Cloud Platform Engineering. He's a Google veteran whose titles there have included CIO, CTO and engineering chancellor. His job will include building out Symantec's cloud computing infrastructure.

The hires are part of a broader shake-up that Symantec said was coming in a regulatory filing earlier this year. It said it plans to take charges related to its reorganization amounting to between $220 million and $250 million for the 2014 fiscal year ending next March. In June, it carried out the largest of a series of job cuts, eliminating about 1,700. Of those, 1,000 were supposed to have been cut in June, with the remaining cuts taking place this month.