In an effort to increase the potency of its information management, Symantec is acquiring Clearwell Systems, a privately-held leader in the eDiscovery market. Clearwell’s eDiscover, offering archiving and backup products, greatly complements Symantec’s information management solution. The acquisition is said to somewhere around $390 million and is subject to regulatory approval before it locks in on the third quarter of the year.

“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.”

Clearwell is expected to extend the reach of Symantec’s market opportunity that will secure the company’s position in the eDiscovery pitch. Gartner says that eDiscovery has grown by 14 percent year-over-year, and is reckoned to reach $1.7 billion b 2014. Moreover, companies are estimated to spend a third more on eDiscovery compared to those with content archiving solutions, Gartner added.

Symantec and Clearwell have pretty much secured their position in this growing trend as they help consumers proactively and reactively manage discovery information with efficiently and effectively be it on-premise or in the cloud, all of these while significantly shrinking outlays.

“Archiving and eDiscovery are two critical elements of information governance,” said Aaref Hilaly, president and chief executive officer, Clearwell Systems. “By joining forces and combining the industry’s leading archiving solution with the industry’s leading eDiscovery solution, we will be uniquely positioned to deliver a seamless, integrated information governance workflow, benefitting both Symantec and Clearwell customers.”

In other Symantec dealings, the company teamed up with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the UN Office on Drugs and Xrime (UNODC) to fight cyber crime, aiming at making the internet a safer place for consumers and businesses to converge. We’ve also seen them talking about the need for tighter credit card security, and that organizations have to identify individuals immediately in case of data seepages. The case of Son’y failure to guard its customer’s data from a hacker is probably one of those instances Symantec is talking about. We can expect Symantec to be doing quite an amount of acquisitions, partnerships and product developments this year as the security and storage software company hungers for expanding its market.

Apart from Symantec, VMware is also acquiring Shavlik Channel for an undisclosed amount to add SMB cloud management to its virtualization and cloud computing portfolio. Market Research says the acquisition will be a boost for the Shavlik Channel.