Welcome Guest. | Log In | Register | Membership Benefits

Symantec To Acquire Clearwell

Clearwell's eDiscovery solution enhances Symantec’s Enterprise Vault eDiscovery capabilities

May 19, 2011 | 04:26 PM | 


MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – May 19, 2011 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Clearwell Systems, Inc., a recognized leader in the eDiscovery market. The acquisition of Clearwell will bring together the industry’s leading eDiscovery, archiving and backup offerings to provide customers one of the most comprehensive information management solutions available. Under the terms of the agreement, Symantec will acquire Clearwell for a purchase price of approximately $390 million, net of Clearwell’s existing cash balance of approximately $20 million. The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval, and is expected to close in the September quarter.

Click to Tweet: @Symantec to acquire @Clearwell Systems - brings together leading #archiving and #eDiscovery solutions

“As information continues to grow at unprecedented rates, the biggest challenge for customers is to protect, manage and backup this information as well as have the ability to categorize and discover it efficiently,” said Deepak Mohan, senior vice president, Information Management Group, Symantec. “The acquisition of Clearwell’s market leading electronic discovery solution will further increase Symantec’s ability to get the right information, to the right people, at the right time, while reducing overall legal review costs and limiting risk.”

Clearwell's eDiscovery solution complements and enhances Symantec’s Enterprise Vault eDiscovery capabilities to create a more complete end-to-end eDiscovery solution. The existing integration of Enterprise Vault with the Clearwell eDiscovery Platform positions Symantec to quickly help IT and legal users streamline and reduce the cost, time and risk of eDiscovery across the most relevant information sources including email, desktops, file servers, backups and the cloud.

This acquisition will expand Symantec’s addressable market opportunity and will position the company as a leader in the fast-growing eDiscovery software market, which, according to Gartner, is growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 14 percent and is estimated to reach $1.7 billion by 20141. In addition, this acquisition is expected to provide future cross-sell and product integration synergies across Symantec backup and security, by leveraging Symantec NetBackup, Data Loss Prevention and Data Insight.

“Archiving and eDiscovery are two critical elements of information governance,” said Aaref Hilaly, president and chief executive officer, Clearwell Systems. “By joining forces and combining the industry’s leading archiving solution with the industry’s leading eDiscovery solution, we will be uniquely positioned to deliver a seamless, integrated information governance workflow, benefitting both Symantec and Clearwell customers.”

Organizations are being required to adopt more formal information governance processes to help reduce the costs and risks associated with legal discovery. According to Gartner, through 2012, companies without an information governance strategy and technology for content archiving solutions, will spend a third more on eDiscovery than those with content archiving solutions.2 Together Symantec and Clearwell are positioned to offer customers the ability to both proactively and reactively manage and discover their information with increased speed, efficiency and scale, both on-premise and in the cloud, while at the same time helping customers reduce costs and risks.

Symantec expects this transaction to be one-and-a-half cents dilutive to non-GAAP earnings per share in fiscal year 2012. The transaction is expected to be accretive starting in fiscal year 2013. Upon close of the acquisition, Clearwell will join the Information Management Group led by Senior Vice President Deepak Mohan. For more information on how Clearwell will complement Symantec's information management portfolio please visit: http://www.symantec.com/Clearwell

Webcast and Conference Call Information

Symantec will host a conference call and webcast today to discuss the acquisition at 1:30 p.m. PT/ 4:30 p.m. ET. The live discussion can be accessed by dialing 888-278-8459 domestic and 913-312-1502 internationally, passcode 3687953. An audio webcast of the call will also be available at www.symantec.com/invest. Please go to the Web site at least 15 minutes early to register, download and install any necessary audio software. A replay of the call will be available via webcast at www.symantec.com/invest. A slide presentation providing an overview of the transaction and strategic rationale is available at http://investor.symantec.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=89422&p=irol-eventnpres.

Connect with Symantec

View SlideShare Presentation

Follow Symantec on Twitter

Join Symantec on Facebook

Subscribe to Symantec News RSS Feed

View Symantec’s SlideShare Channel

Visit Symantec Connect Business Community

About Clearwell

Clearwell Systems is transforming the way enterprises, government agencies, and law firms perform electronic discovery (eDiscovery) in response to litigation, regulatory inquiries, and internal investigations. The Clearwell E–Discovery Platform streamlines end–to–end eDiscovery, providing a single product for identification, collection, preservation, processing, analysis, review and production. Consistently ranked as a leader in independent eDiscovery industry surveys and reports, Clearwell Systems is an active participant in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Project, The Sedona Conference, and the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). For more information, visit www.clearwellsystems.com.

About Storage from Symantec

Symantec helps organizations secure and manage their information-driven world with storage management, email archiving, backup & recovery solutions.

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com.



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dark Reading encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dark Reading moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Dark Reading further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS



Advanced Threats Reports

report How Did They Get In? A Guide to Tracking Down The Source of an APT
If you think that your organization hasn't been affected by an advanced persistent threat, you probably haven't looked hard enough. Identifying that your organization is under attack is difficult enough; determining the scope of infiltration and damage presents a whole new level of challenge. To effectively protect against APTs, security pros will need to employ an arsenal of tools in a coordinated fashion, as well as develop new understandings of and approaches to system and data exploits. Here's a short and simple guide to this challenge.

report Detecting and Defending Against Advanced Persistent Threats
APTs are a growing problem for enterprises big and small. Protecting your organization from these targeted threats requires constant vigilance, ongoing employee training and a concerted effort to align security systems to address every phase of an APT. Companies also need to develop a remediation and response plan if, despite best efforts, defenses are breached.

report Smarter, Stealthier, Sneakier Malware
Increasingly sophisticated and targeted attacks are making it more difficult for organizations to detect and defend against the latest malware. In this compendium of recent coverage from Dark Reading, you?ll get a look at some of the newest -- and most dangerous -- malware on the Web, and what you can do to stop it.

Other reports from the Advanced Threats Tech Center:

Related Content

MOBILE SECURITY - Mapping an Ecosystem of Risk
This white paper highlights the various considerations for defending mobile applications-from the mobile application architecture itself to the myriad testing technologies needed to properly assess mobile applications risk.

Software Security Delivered in the Cloud
This Solution Guide details the automated, turnkey service that requires no special security assessment expertise. It details HP's market-leading static and dynamic analysis technologies that help organizations worldwide gain insight into the security state of their essential business applications.

SANS Mobility/BYOD Security Survey
This survey, which includes input from more than 500 IT professionals, explores how organizations are managing risk around their end user mobile devices as well as what level of policies and controls enterprises have around mobile usage.

Expert Guide to Application Security - Real-time Hybrid Analysis
Explore the next generation of hybrid security analysis - what it is, how it works, and its benefits. This white paper details how hybrid application security enables organizations to resolve critical software security issues faster and at a lower cost than any other available technology.

A Mainstay Partners Study: Does Application Security Pay?
Measuring the Business Impact of Software Security Assurance Solutions: a study of 17 organizations that implemented solutions from Fortify Software, combining industry research and benchmark analysis to identify, qualify, and quantify the full range of benefits seen from their SSA investments.




Featured Webcasts
Featured Whitepapers
Featured Reports