Michael Spertus is about to get some colleagues. Right now, Spertus is the only employee at Symantec doing fundamental research, which means he is looking at the limits of security technology without a specific product or business goal in mind. This is a new part of <A HREF="http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5949613.html?tag=zdnn.alert">Symantec Research Labs,</A> which the Cupertino, Calif., software maker aims to expand. Last week, for the first time, the company showed off its Symantec Research Labs to press and analysts, at two events. Symantec Research Labs is much smaller than the research arms of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Sun Microsystems, for instance. But after the merger with storage software maker Veritas Software, Symantec feels its research group has come of age and is worth showing off to the outside world.