I'll start with presenting some known results about the boundedness and compactness properties of the generalized Cesaro operator, Tg, on Hardy spaces in the unit disc, as well as some of its applications. In the second part we introduce a variant of this operator which depends on an analytic symbol g, and we prove the analogous results for this operator. As an application we generalize a theorem of J. Rattya about complex linear differential equations, and we prove a result about factorization of derivatives of Hardy functions.