Symantec Adds Cloud-Based Archiving By Acquiring LiveOffice

Data protection and cloud services provider Symantec, filling out its cloud and collaboration software portfolio, revealed that it has acquired longtime partner LiveOffice, a provider of cloud-based archiving services.

Financial details of the transaction were not released, but Jefferies & Company equity analyst Aaron Schwartz said in a media advisory that he estimated the deal cost Symantec about $115 million (£75m). Schwartz also projected that privately held LiveOffice’s 2011 revenue was in the $40 million (£26m) range.

Hosted archiving

LiveOffice, founded in 1998, provides hosted archiving services to about 20,000 customers. Email archiving is a large part of LiveOffice’s business, but the company has expanded to include other content types – including documents and unstructured data, such as social media content.

In late 2009, LiveOffice began offering archiving support for a number of Web-based email services, including Microsoft Exchange Online, Google Apps, Cisco’s new WebEx Mail and Intermedia, along with several others. LiveOffice uses its homegrown SaaS-based CloudMerge platform to integrate these email services with its archiving. Archiving systems can be deployed for either cloud or on-site email systems and can be done in short order, CEO Nick Mehta toldeWEEK.

“As far as we know, we’re the first archive provider to support both cloud-based and on-premises email,” Mehta said at the time.

The cloud offerings will complement Symantec’s backup, archiving and e-discovery capabilities. Symantec has said it plans to continue development of more cloud-based applications as time goes on.

“Symantec will more deeply integrate its backup, archiving (Enterprise Vault) and eDiscovery (Clearwell) solutions with LiveOffice to provide a full portfolio of storage and information management solutions as an on-premise or cloud-based offering,” Schwartz wrote in his advisory. “Without full ownership, and the ability to fully integrate the solutions, there has likely been a limitation of data flow between the various storage applications and locations.”