iTWire - Symantec completes aquisition of MessageLabs, bolsters SaaS

Symantec completes aquisition of MessageLabs, bolsters SaaS

by David M Williams

Monday, 17 November 2008

Early last month Symantec announced their intention to acquire global anti-spam, anti-virus mail-filtering company MessageLabs. The due diligence and legalities have finalised with Symantec today announcing the acquisition has completed. With this comes the news of a new Symantec Software as a Service (SaaS) arm.

On October 9th I reported on Symantec's intentions to purchase MessageLabs. This has now completed with formal proceedings complete.

The acquisition was an interesting one from the point of view that Symantec's recent purchases had been predominantly server-based products such as Veritas, makers of the popular BackupExec, and the somewhat more obscure Altiris help desk, software deployment and network inventory and management suite.

By contrast, MessageLabs is purely a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform which is most famous for scrubbing a corporation's incoming e-mail feed and forwarding on cleansed mail. There is no infrastructure burden or requirement on MessageLab's clients save to adjust DNS records to deliver mail to MessageLabs in the first instance and to keep MessageLabs record of their list of internal e-mail addresses up to date.

MessageLab's customers include major banks and law firms.

Adrian Chamberlain, formerly head of MessageLabs, confirmed that Symantec were implementing a major SaaS group, which will be lead by himself. This will integrate Symantec's existing SaaS offerings in online storage, online backup and remote access.

The purchase price has been previously reported as $USD 695 million.

Chamberlain wrote to MessageLabs customers delivering this message:

Dear Customer,

Today marks the completion of Symantec’s acquisition of MessageLabs. We are joining with Symantec’s existing Software-as-a-Service team, the Symantec Protection Network (SPN), to form a newly created Software-as-a-Service group, led by me. We are excited about this next chapter in our history and feel very confident that the new combined MessageLabs/Symantec SaaS group will allow us to innovate and introduce new services and technologies that will offer many benefits to our clients in the months and years ahead.

The initial phase of integration has gone very smoothly and we are now able to focus on the future strategy of our new SaaS group. Our primary focus remains building on the high levels of customer support and service accuracy that MessageLabs services are known for — our next priority is to develop a roadmap for the next generation of Symantec SaaS and hybrid security solutions.

We understand that much of our success is rooted in our high levels of client satisfaction, which owes a great deal to the excellent client support experience provided as an integral part of the service to all of our clients, large and small. Symantec understands that the SaaS model has special requirements and will help us ensure that the client experience remains strong. Symantec has no plans to change this support model or current MessageLabs support team structure.

Your MessageLabs services will continue to be supported by an industry leading set of SLAs to provide ongoing assurance, which includes year-round 24x7, email and telephone, multi-language client support provided through global teams located in EMEA, North America and APAC. All existing procedures for client and technical support remain in place, and any changes will be communicated in advance.

Our malware and spam teams will remain 100% focused on providing you market-leading accuracy against every new and unknown threat.

I want you to feel confident about our commitment to an outstanding customer experience, and our ongoing investment and development in MessageLabs services. In the future, we look forward to offering MessageLabs clients an expanded list of integrated services and to leverage the resources and economies of scale of both MessageLabs and Symantec.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me personally or your MessageLabs sales or customer service representatives if you have any questions, or if there is anything we can do to be of service to you and your business. We appreciate your business and look forward to continuing our relationship with you.

Best regards,
Adrian Chamberlain
Senior Vice President, SaaS Group
Symantec

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