Buying urge grips vendors

IT market has shrunk after acquisitions

The IT market has shrunk further after two vendor giants, Symantec and EMC, made acquisitions last week.

Symantec, which paid $13.5bn for Veritas at the end of last year, got out its cheque book again, this time for endpoint security vendor Sygate.

Enrique Salem, senior vice-president security products and solutions at Symantec, said: “It is critical to have an endpoint compliance solution that will allow companies to leverage their existing IT infrastructure.”

The firm is also hoping to cash in on Sygate’s compliance offering, which tied in with its recent Veritas purchase will offer a complete storage and security compliance range.

EMC, a rival to Symantec as the storage and security markets converge, bought Rainfinity, a NAS vendor, for about $100m.

Howard Elias, EMC executive vice-president corporate marketing and office of technology, said: “EMC is extending the benefits of virtualisation to EMC and non-EMC NAS environments to enable more comprehensive information lifecycle management solutions.”