Symantec to Acquire PowerQuest

Symantec Tuesday agreed to acquire PowerQuest for $150
million in cash to add provisioning, storage management, and disaster
recovery technologies to complement its Ghost product in the hopes of offering a full range of data lifecycle management to enterprise customers.


Symantec Ghost makes reliable backups of PC drives, including applications
and critical data.


But Cupertino, Calif.’s, Symantec, who hopes to close the
purchase by the end of 2003, is looking to stretch the capabilities of Ghost to protect servers, workstations, laptops and handhelds from losing data during disruptive events such as natural disasters and power outages.


Symantec spokesman Cris Paden told internetnews.com the company will
use PowerQuest’s imaging and deployment, system migration, and management
updates to provide “cradle-to-grave management” to help shield enterprises
from potentially crippling data loss.


Symantec will inherit PowerQuest software products PowerQuest VolumeManager,
PartitionMagic Professional, and ServerMagic, which allow customers to add
new storage, reconfigure existing storage and monitor and manage storage
devices, as well as the Orem, Utah-based vendor’s 300 employees.


PowerQuest’s products, like most backup and recovery solutions, help
organizations quickly create backups without bringing servers offline,
restore systems back to a specific point-in-time, and recover individual
files and folders.


PowerQuest V2i Protector complements Symantec’s
anti-virus products while PartitionMagic allows users to create, resize,
merge, or convert partitions without killing data. DriveImage is
PowerQuest’s imaging software for disaster recovery, backups and system
upgrades.


“With this acquisition, we wanted to figure out a way to enhance Ghost to
benefit customers and enterprises through providing them a complete storage
lifecycle management architecture,” Paden said.


More generally, Symantec President and COO John Schwarz said in a public
release that combining imaging technologies with security products will help
customers better manage existing infrastructure.

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