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Cloud Reportby Jeffrey Schwartz, Executive Editor

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Symantec Acquires Cloud Archiving Provider LiveOffice

Looking to build on its e-discovery, compliance and storage management portfolio, Symantec this week said it has acquired cloud archiving provider LiveOffice for $115 million.

The deal will allow Symantec to extend its push into helping customers address retention of e-mail and other content. EMC, IBM and Hewlett-Packard all have competitive offerings. Thanks to its $10.3 billion acquisition of Autonomy last year, HP has become a major player in the market for enterprise search and e-discovery software and services.

LiveOffice focuses on cloud-based business continuity and offers an archiving and compliance service that is said to offer rapid access to archived data. Acquiring LiveOffice seems to make sense for Symantec -- it was already a hosted OEM provider of Symantec's Vault.cloud. LiveOffice already integrates with Symantec's recently acquired Clearwell eDiscovery platform, which allows for the analysis of data imported from LiveOffice, Symantec Enterprise Vault and other data sources.

I spent some time talking to the LiveOffice team last summer when Microsoft launched its Office 365 cloud-based e-mail and collaboration service. LiveOffice pitched its service as an add-on to Office 365 for those who need more storage capacity than the 25 GB per user limit imposed by Microsoft's service. The LiveOffice service is also a good hedge for organizations looking to regain access to their e-mail and SharePoint content in the event of an Office 365 outage.

LiveOffice also has partnerships with Salesforce.com, Dropbox and Box.net, in addition to Symantec. Symantec intends to continue offering the LiveOffice service offerings but a spokeswoman indicated that the company is considering branding scenarios in line with the Symantec brand.

LiveOffice CEO Nick Mehta will stay on board during an unspecified transition period. Jeff Hausman, LiveOffice's COO, is now VP of product delivery at Symantec.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on January 19, 2012


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