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Fortify to Buy Competing App Security Firm


By Jennifer deJong
February 1, 2007 — 
In what may be the first sign of consolidation in the application security market, Fortify Software in mid-January announced plans to buy a competitor.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has entered a definitive agreement to acquire McLean, Va.-based Secure Software. The terms of the sale were not disclosed, but a statement released by Fortify said the acquisition includes “certain intellectual property, capital assets and skilled resources.”

Both companies sell source code analysis tools, which find and fix security flaws early in the development life cycle, before a hacker could exploit them. Fortify plans to incorporate some aspects of Secure Software’s CodeAssure into its own Source Code Analysis (SCA) tool, but it will not sell CodeAssure as a separate offering. “We will support CodeAssure in the short run and transition those customers to Fortify SCA,” said Fortify CEO John Jack, in a phone interview with SD Times. “Both products approach source code analysis in a similar fashion.” The Fortify offering is essentially a superset of CodeAssure, he said.

The acquisition isn’t about products, said Voke analyst Theresa Lanowitz. It’s about CLASP, Secure Software’s methodology for addressing application security at each stage of the application life cycle. CLASP (which stands for Comprehensive, Lightweight Application Security Process) has some real weight behind it, she said. Fortify’s offerings align with the stages of CLASP, in much the same way that IBM Rational tools align with those of the Rational Unified Process, she said, referring to IBM’s lightweight development methodology. “I see this [acquisition] as analogous.”

Fortify has acquired, among other assets, the license rights to CLASP, which Secure Software donated to the Open Web Application Security Project last year, noted Fortify’s Jack. “We have acquired the brainpower behind it,” he said. Fortify was expected to complete the sale by the end of January.

But how much of that brainpower will actually assume a role at Fortify isn’t yet clear. Secure Software CEO Kevin Kernan is not staying on. “I will assist in the transition,” he said. “And some number of employees will come across.” But who, and how many has yet to be determined, said Jack. John Viega, CLASP’s principal author, left Secure Software last year to join McAfee, noted Kernan.

MORE CONSOLIDATION AHEAD?
SPI Dynamics’ security evangelist Michael Sutton said consolidation is likely to take the form of companies that sell source code analysis tools teaming up with those that sell so-called black-box testing tools. “The two will converge.”

Black-box tools test applications by attacking them, much the same way a hacker would.

A more interesting question to Voke’s Lanowitz is: When will a big application life-cycle management player buy an application security company? “I expect one of them is going to make that kind of statement,” she said, referring to Compuware, IBM, HP and Microsoft. Secure Software’s Kernan didn’t disagree. “They are keeping a close ear to the ground on this space. I think we will see that in late 2007, or early 2008.”


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