PC utility software house Symantec Corp has acquired Aukland, New Zealand-based Binary Research Limited, generally regarded as the only company that counts in the disk cloning business. Symantec has paid $27.5m for the assets of Binary, the company which developed the Ghost utility. Ghost, which stands for generated hardware oriented software transfer, is used for workstation cloning and disaster recovery, and provides a means for system administrators to create a master image of a workstation for storage and downloading onto multiple stations on a network. It is typically used to roll out and standardize new PCs or upgrade existing ones by large customers, value added resellers and configuration centers, universities, training centers and PC manufacturers. Binary’s Aukland offices will remain open as a development center, and the company’s president, Murray Haszard, stays on as general manager of the Ghost business. Symantec says that 3.5m Ghost seats have been installed over the past 18 months, and that more than half the companies in the Fortune 500 list are users. A Norton-branded version of the product is expected to appear in the September quarter. Symantec, which says the acquisition will be non-dilutive, will write off between $12m and $14m of the purchase price as in-process research and development. Like its struggling competitor Quarterdeck Corp, Symantec is making a bid for the corporate market, and last month struck a joint development deal with IBM Corp that will result in a single family of enterprise anti-virus software products from the two companies under the Norton AntiVirus brand name. Quarterdeck is planning its own entry into the disk cloning market next month with DiskClone Corporate.
