Symantec, the security firm best known for its Norton antivirus software, has announced its plans to spend more than $1 billion during 2011 to enhance its capabilities in the fields of mobile, virtual spaces and cloud.

Speaking at the company’s annual Vision event in Barcelona, Symantec CEO Enrique Salem said that the company would spend up to $1.25 billion on acquisitions during the running year.

During his speech at the event, he said, "We'll look at a range of different things. We're interested in extending our portfolio to do more in mobility and cloud computing, and we'll look at what we can do in the virtualisation space.”

Salem added that the company, which has already spent $390m for e-discovery vendor Clearwell, would emerge as no. 1 in each market.

Last year, Symantec acquired VeriSign's security business and back-up company SwapDrive, which allowed the company to bring pioneering technologies to an even wider customer-base.

In addition, Symantec is teaming up with cloud pioneers, like that of Salesforce and Amazon, to help them construct and secure their cloud infrastructures.