Symantec will pay about $300 million for PGP, based in Menlo Park, and $70 million for GuardianEdge Technologies, based in San Francisco.
Both of the acquisitions, which are privately held, are billed as helping to bolster Symantec's ability to help corporate customers and consumers protect their information, through data encryption and other techniques, the company said.
Infosecurity notes that GuardianEdge's technology has been used by Lockheed Martin and the US Department of Defense, while PGP has more than 110 000 corporate and government customers worldwide.
In a press statement, Symantec says that, by bringing together PGP and GuardianEdge's standards-based encryption capabilities for full-disk, removable media, email, file, folder and smartphone, with Symantec's endpoint security, data loss prevention and gateway security offerings, it will create the broadest set of integrated data protection solutions.
"As information becomes increasingly mobile, it's essential to take an information-centric approach to security. Our market-leading data protection solutions provide the intelligence for customers to better understand what data is important, who owns it and who accesses it", said said Francis deSouza, senior vice president of Symantec.
"With these acquisitions we can further protect information by using encryption in an intelligent and policy-driven way to give the right users access to the right information, enabling the trust that individuals and organisations need to operate confidently in an information-driven world", he said.
"We're now able to offer the industry's most comprehensive solution across encryption and data loss prevention for protecting confidential data on endpoints, networks, storage systems and in the cloud", he added.
Infosecurity understands that the acquisition did not come as a surprise to senior staff on the PGP stand on the final day of the Infosecurity Europe show yesterday.
In his blog for Computer Weekly, Bloor Research security analyst and practice leader Nigel Stanley said that, before the news broke, one member of PGP's staff only had time for a ten minute chat and "hid their laptop from view in the public display area."
"I was sitting on the Symantec stand an hour or so later having a chat with a senior product person when I was told the news. What was to be a pleasant discussion about Symantec turned into a bit of a navel gazing exercise as we all ruminated about the ramifications of the deal", he said.
According to Stanley, Symantec has had an encryption sized hole in their offering that had been papered over but never properly filled.
"Unlike McAfee, who realised the importance of encryption and went after Safeboot in late 2007, Symantec never really took the plunge until this week", he said.
"The OEM relationship that Symantec had with GuardianEdge provided them with some data protection experience which has now been confirmed with the purchase of that company for a seemingly cheap deal", he added.
In his CW blog, Stanley noted that PGP have been upping their game recently, as was demonstrated by the TrustCenter acquisition, taking them further into the security infrastructure world.
"The strategy appeared to resonate well and gave me cause to think that PGP had finally gotten their strategic act together and were set on a very interesting path. Clearly Symantec thought the same hence the $300M deal", he added.
Stanley says that Symantec now have to turn this acquisition into something useful, and something that will prove the market wrong, many of whom consider them to be synonymous with irritating bloatware.
"PGP is good, well proven technology that carries a strong brand and should not be sucked into the "borg" never to be seen again", he noted.