Symantec, founded in 1982, is one of the world's largest software companies with more than 17,500 employees in more than 40 countries. The company provides both security and storage and systems management solutions. Their customer base includes consumers, small businesses, and some of the world's largest global organizations. The company's phenomenal growth can be attributed to a combination of market acceptance and strategic acquisitions.

In early 2008, the company's Customer Experience (CX) team started crafting a roadmap designed to consolidate several of the support and pseudo-community offerings into a single, consistent, and best-of-breed community offering. The goal of this consolidation was to give Symantec customers a single point of contact where they could engage with the company's support, marketing, and product management teams. A secondary goal was to reduce the support costs associated with maintaining a collection of disparate community offerings.

Dell and Symantec are part of a strategic relationship formed to help the two global leaders sell complimentary products from each other’s portfolios.

One of the challenges of this type of relationship is the flow of information between sales teams in two different companies spread across multiple countries.

The Dell-Symantec Portal was launched to facilitate the timely and efficient flow of information between these two organizations.