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.-based Symantec, which 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, tools that 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 specific points-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 stated in a public release that combining imaging technologies with security products will help
customers better manage existing infrastructure.

Story courtesy of Internet News.

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