Symantec Buys MessageLabs for 700 Million Bucks

Symantec elbowed its way into the Software as a Service (SaaS) space by buying email scrubbing company MessageLabs for 700 Million US dollars. In a down economy.

From InformationWeek here:

Symantec on Wednesday said it has agreed to buy MessageLabs for $695 million in cash, and plans to fold the company’s online e-mail and instant-messaging service for business into Symantec’s online backup, storage, and other software-as-a-service offerings.

The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. After that, Symantec plans to integrate MessageLabs’ services with its own to form a new SaaS product group for businesses. Initially, such a combination would bring together MessageLabs’ online e-mail and e-mail storage, IM, and Web filtering services with Symantec’s online backup, storage, and remote access products.

Steinnon can’t believe Symantec paid this much.  And notes that:

the remaining email security vendors hope that the result will be similar to Symantec’s Brightmail acquisition:  the competition falls into a black hole never to be heard from again.

Yeah, whatever happened to Brightmail?  This leaves Qualys as the next big SaaS player that should be on the market for purchase.