Symantec Lands LiveOffice

By Rikki Endsley (@rikkiends) Jan 16, 2012

Symantec Corp. announced the acquisition of LiveOffice for a cool US$ 115 million. LiveOffice, Symantec’s hosted archiving OEM partner for Enterprise Vault.cloud, will add a cloud-based messaging protection solution to Symantec's information security and management solutions arsenal.

Cloud Bound

Last year, Symantec joined the cloud storage and backup race with its Enterprise Vault.cloud and Cloud Storage for Enterprise Vault solutions, in addition to a cloud messaging solution, Symantec Instant Messaging Security cloud (IMS.cloud). IMS.cloud scans instant messages sent or received within an organization, checking for viruses, worms and URLs to malicious websites, while also matching messages against the organization's acceptable use policies.

In addition to gaining footing in the cloud, Symantec expanded its social media archiving solutions last year. With the release of Enterprise Vault 10, Symantec added the Data Classification Service feature to classify and filter email, and the new ability to archive content that is posted to public-facing blogs.

Symantec Goes Shopping

Symantec also dropped US$ 390 million last year to buy Clearwell, thereby adding some e-Discovery power to its portfolio. In 2010, Symantec spent US$ 2 billion on acquisitions, which included the US$ 1.28 billion takeover of VeriSign.

At the Vision annual conference in Barcelona last year, Symantec unveiled plans to spend US$ 1.25 billion on acquisitions to enhance its reach in the field of mobile, virtual and cloud security in 2011. The LiveOffice purchase shows that Symantec's 2012 budget included a chunk of change set aside for strategic acquisitions, too.