Cupertino-based Symantec Corp. (
News -
Alert) announced on
Wednesday it had agreed to purchase UK’s MessageLabs Ltd. for $695 million in cash.
Symantec has reportedly made this move with a hope of strengthening its position in the messaging security market and gaining a larger and comfortable foothold in the rapidly growing Software-as-a-Service segment.
With more than 19,000 clients, including Fortune 500 companies, MessageLabs provides a range of managed security services to protect, control, encrypt and archive communications across email, Web and instant messaging.
In a statement issued on Wedensday, Symantec said MessageLabs generated approximately $145 million in revenue during fiscal year 2008 and grew by more than 20 percent over the prior fiscal year.
The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory approvals, and is expected to close by the end of the 2008 calendar year.
Symantec hopes to capitalize on cross-selling and up-selling its existing SaaS (News - Alert) offerings of backup, storage and online remote access into the MessageLabs customer base.
In addition, it is planning to make use of MessageLabs’ expertise in its own offerings such as data loss prevention, compliance, endpoint security and archiving.
“MessageLabs extends our investments in the Software-as-a Service segment and will allow us to offer our customers unprecedented choice from a single provider of message security solutions” said John W. Thompson, chairman and chief executive officer, Symantec.
By combining MessageLabs’ expertise with Symantec’s portfolio of technologies, Symantec can certainly offer broadest range of offerings in the messaging security market including software, appliance and hosted services.
“Symantec and MessageLabs have a common belief in the benefits of in-the-cloud services and how they enable customers to be protected from threats and enforce policy,” said Adrian Chamberlain, chief executive officer, MessageLabs.
MessageLabs customers will now have access to Symantec Protection Network offerings through MessageLabs’ established SaaS go-to-market model, the companies said in the release.
Market research firm IDC (
News -
Alert) has predicted that SaaS market may grow from current size of $5.71 billion to $16.98 billion by 2012.
Nathesh is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Nathesh's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
More
More Stories >>