Computer security firm Symantec today announced $115 million acquisition of cloud data archiving and storage vendor LiveOffice. LiveOffice is located in Torrance, California, and provide a variety of targeted e-mail, instant messaging, social media, file sharing and storage and other applications of electronic search services.

Symantec said the acquisition will strengthen its information management products, providing customers with a mixed selection of stored information through Symantec’s data center. LiveOffice already integrated with Clearwell’s eDiscovery platform, which is used to collect information such as legal proceedings. In July 2011, Symantec completed the acquisition of Clearwell.

LiveOffice provides monthly unlimited storage for users and its cloud applications can link to other commonly used software such as Microsoft Office365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Dropbox. The company has more than 20,000 customers in over 50 countries.

“The acquisition of LiveOffice further extends Symantec’s leadership in archiving and eDiscovery; Symantec continues to enhance its offerings and deepen its commitment to provide the most comprehensive and innovative Information Management solutions delivered on premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid solution,” said Deepak Mohan, Senior Vice President, Information Management Group of Symantec.

The acquisition will further strengthen Symantec cloud based offering including anti-spam, security, continuity, archiving, compliance, and eDiscovery. The company will now address customers’ issues and challenges on messaging protection for both premise and hosted email.

EMC, Symantec and IBM have generated the most storage software sales by revenue last year, as per a data published by IDC. EMC is leading the position with 24.5 percent stack followed by IBM and Symantec with 15.3 and 14 percent respectively.

Apple might also extend its cloud-based app offerings on its iCloud store where cloud based apps can be built for interacting with the Internet cloud rather than just operating locally, as predicted by J. Gerry Purdy of eweek.

Symantec also said that they plan to strengthen the Enterprise Vault archiving platform and Clearwell eDiscovery platforms. As a future expansion, Clearwell eDiscovery platform will be able to collect and store large-scale information from Enterprise Vault.