IBM Takes Over Ounce Labs

July 30, 2009 by Sanjay

Armonk, New York-headquartered IBM Corporation has announced the acquisition of a privately-owned software company that operates in the source code analysis domain. When the formalities of takeover are complete, this small company will merge with IBM’s Rational software business. The cost of the acquisition has not been made known.

Founded in 2002 by Jack Danahy, Lawrence Rose and Ryan Berg, Ounce Labs Inc is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, with another office in London, UK. It is presently headed by Gary Jackson, President and CEO.

The company is an industry leader in enterprise static application security testing (SAST). For the just ended quarter, Q2 2009, the company had reported an y-o-y quarterly bookings of over 80%. Its flagship product, Ounce 6, is an application security testing solution that scans source code to detect vulnerabilities, and also suggests remediation action that drills down to individual lines of code. The software also helps organizations verify regulatory and policy compliance, such as PCI DSS, FISMA, HIPAA and others.

Ounce Labs’ softwares and expertise have been put to use by IBM for its own application securities. The company has a few patents in this domain to its credit.