Information security and archiving were areas of the business where Symantec saw good levels of performance last year (see the Symantec snapshot within the Enterprise Software Supplier Landscape 2012 report), outperforming the storage management side of the business. On that basis alone its acquisition of LiveOffice for a reported $115m, makes sense because it will boost the archiving aspect of the business.
LiveOffice brings cloud-based archiving and storage, which have the potential for serious growth. Its portfolio is aimed at providing messaging protection covering email archiving, compliance, ediscovery and continuity. These are hot areas in a business environment where regulation, compliance, data security and reputation protection are high on c-level agendas.
Symantec knows what it is getting because it already partners with LiveOffice, who provides hosted archiving for Symantec’s Enterprise Vault. In fact Symantec gets a complete managed services operation (along with around 20,000 clients) that could be the springboard into a range of new services.
As the adoption of the cloud and mobile services increases, security becomes more important but has a surprisingly low profile. We predict that will change during 2012 and hope Symantec’s acquisition is the start of a lot more activity in the space.