Symantec’s Eubanks to Lead E-Commerce Firm

SAN FRANCISCO —  Gordon Eubanks, chief executive of Symantec Corp. and a fixture in the software industry for two decades, said Tuesday that he will leave the leading maker of utility programs to head Oblix Inc., a Silicon Valley e-commerce start-up.

Mountain View-based Oblix automates the process of tracking and updating employee and customer information over corporate networks and databases.

Eubanks will stay with Symantec, in nearby Cupertino, until the company hires a new chief executive. He has headed the firm since his former company, C&E; Software, acquired it in 1984, then built it into the largest provider of tools to improve the performance and reliability of PCs.

Oblix plans to create new ways for large corporations to build their e-commerce capacity by efficiently managing employee, customer and supplier information over intranets, he said. Intranets are in-house computer networks analogous to the larger Internet.

“E-commerce is about treating every customer and every individual uniquely and about establishing a one-to-one relationship with every customer,” Eubanks said.

The small, privately held company counts Novell Inc., Netscape Communications Corp. and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a leading venture capital firm, among its major investors.

The move represents a big change for the head of one of the world’s largest software companies. Some months ago, Eubanks said he would leave Symantec, signaling he was ready for a new challenge.

Eubanks “made people aware that you didn’t necessarily have to take a product from Microsoft the way it came,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with Giga Information Group in Norwell, Mass. “You could make it better, work where Microsoft wasn’t, make money that way and create a market.”