Francis deSouza is group president of Enterprise Products and Services at Symantec. In this role he leads product management, engineering, industry relations and operations for Symantec’s enterprise security, information management, storage and availability management and managed security services solutions.

Most recently, deSouza served as senior vice president of the Enterprise Security Group where he led Symantec’s Endpoint Security, Messaging and Web security, Data Loss Prevention, Compliance and Security Management, Endpoint Management, Encryption, Endpoint Virtualization, and Identity and Authentication businesses. deSouza joined Symantec through the company’s acquisition of IMlogic in February 2006. At IMlogic, he was the founder and CEO, building the company into a recognized leader in the rapidly growing market for instant messaging security with more than 750 customers across 23 countries.

Prior to founding IMlogic, deSouza served as product unit manager at Microsoft, directing a team in the development of the enterprise real-time collaboration offerings, including instant messaging, chat, Voice over IP and NetMeeting. Previously, he was founder and CEO of Flash Communications, which quickly emerged as a leader in the corporate instant messaging space and was acquired by Microsoft in 1998. Prior to that, deSouza worked in management consulting and as a computer science researcher at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Labs.

deSouza holds a number of patents in computer security. In addition to his work at Symantec, deSouza is Chairman of the Board of Directors of MedHelp International, a global online health community. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with MS and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a minor in Economics.