In brief: SonicWall buys MailFrontier

SonicWall is expanding its security offerings into e-mail security with a $31 million purchase of MailFrontier, an e-mail security specialist. MailFrontier sells software and appliances that filter e-mail for phishing attempts, viruses and spam. SonicWall announced no short-term plans to integrate MailFrontier into its existing appliances, but spoke of having an e-mail security offering to flesh out its line of security gear. SonicWall makes small business security appliances including IPSec and SSL firewall and VPN appliances with gateway anti-virus, anti-spyware, intrusion prevention and content filtering.

Symantec last week announced plans to acquire Relicore, a provider of data-center management software, as part of a bid to round out its offerings for data center customers. The acquisition is expected to be completed during the middle of this month. Financial terms were not disclosed. Symantec is buying Relicore to get its hands on Relicore Clarity, a management tool that offers the ability to discover and track changes to application and server components in a data center. This eliminates the need to track changes manually and can speed up troubleshooting efforts in the event that an upgrade causes a problem, Symantec says. The software also can help ensure that policies required by regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are enforced with related systems, the company says.

PGP announced PGP Command Line 9.0, file encryption software. The software is designed to protect files regardless of where it resides. It runs on the IBM xSeries mainframe, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0. PGP Command Line 9.0, which starts at $7,500, is expected to be available March 1.