June 11, 2009, 2:52 PM — Hewlett-Packard will start shipping Symantec's Norton Online Backup on its notebook and PC computers.
Starting in September, customers will get a 30-day trial version of the service preinstalled on their PCs. The service can be used to back up as much as 5GB of data online. Customers can then download that data from Symantec's Web site if they're away from their computer or if their hard drive crashes.
This isn't the first such deal Symantec has done with HP. The hardware maker already ships a 60-day trial version of Norton Internet Security with its PCs.
Symantec's Norton group has sold desktop backup software for years, but the company has recently pushed into the online backup market. Last year, it acquired SwapDrive, a popular provider in this space.
At the company's financial analyst conference in San Francisco Thursday, Symantec President and CEO Enrique Salem said that this type of SaaS (software-as-a-service) product will be increasingly important to Symantec's business. By 2014, he expects SaaS to make up 15 percent of Symantec's business.
Right now, Symantec's main SaaS product is its MessageLabs e-mail security service.
