Symantec Corp. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Clearwell Systems, Inc., a privately held vendor in the e-discovery market.
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 acquisition is expected to close in the September quarter.
"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."
Upon close of the acquisition, Clearwell will join the Information Management Group led by Mohan.
According to Symantec, Clearwell's e-discovery solution complements and enhances its Enterprise Vault e-discovery capabilities to create a more complete end-to-end e-discovery solution. The company says that the existing integration of Enterprise Vault with the Clearwell eDiscovery Platform enables Symantec to help IT and legal users streamline and reduce the cost, time and risk of e-discovery across the most relevant information sources including email, desktops, file servers, backups and the cloud.