Symantec Acquires LiveOffice for $115 Million

Sites include liveoffice.com , symantec.com . Published on February 2nd, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Those companies that can’t innovate for the Cloud, chose instead to acquire their way into Cloud-relevance. This is just the case with Symantec who’s splashed out $115 million for Cloud-based email archiving company LiveOffice.

Symantec as you may already know is big in the security and storage space, so the acquisition is purely a way for the company to get its foot through the ‘Cloud door’ so to speak. LiveOffice as a business is solid and so it is sensible that Symantec spared no expense in buying it; aside from providing email archiving services, LiveOffice also provides in situ hosting of email—something that makes migrating very easy for the thousands of customers that use the service every day.

LiveOffice itself was started back in 1998 and today counts over 20,000 clients, many of which rely on it to protect and process millions of email each day. The CEO for the company incidentally, is Nick Mehta, a former Symantec executive, so its running won’t be too foreign to Symantec once the reigns are officially taken over.

The integration is expected to enhance Symantec’s ability offer better governance and SaaS in the Cloud, something which many other competing companies have started doing already. Not a bad buy if you ask me.

What say you? Is the movement of services to the Cloud a good thing? Let us know below.