Palamida Offers IP Tracking for Open, Closed Source Apps

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Secretive Silicon Valley startup Palamida announced last week the general availability of its IP Amplifier 3.0 software, its first commercial product for profiling the use of open source and closed source software in applications and the first competition that Black Duck Software has seen since it was established in December 2002. Palamida also announced that it has named Mark Tolliver, a former Sun Microsystems executive, as its CEO.

Black Duck was perhaps prescient when it launched itself into a business that would use an engine of code snippets as fingerprints to detect the use of open and closed source code within corporate applications, since it did so before The SCO Group sued IBM over the latter company's alleged dumping of Unix features, functions, and code into the open source Linux operating system. And after all the shenanigans in that SCO-IBM lawsuit and the awareness that those suits have raised that companies must be aware of the code that their own programmers--as well as those who work on an outsourcing or contractual basis--put into their applications. The bazaar of the open source software environment is great for innovation, but the licensing terms are complex and often conflicting. Being a first mover in a market does not ensure anything but competition, and now Black Duck has some.

Palamida has been flying under the radar until last week, when it announced that Tolliver was taking over the company and that it had significantly expanded the coverage of its software intellectual property (IP) compliance tool, which is called IP Amplifier. Tolliver, you will remember, was an executive vice president in charge of Sun's marketing and strategy, and during his 10-year tenure at Sun was responsible for the iPlanet partnership between Sun and the Netscape middleware software unit of the former AOL-Time Warner (which is now just Time Warner). Eventually, Sun acquired most of the Netscape server products from AOL-Time Warner, rejiggered them, and relaunched them as the Java Enterprise System. Tolliver was in charge of Sun's consumer and embedded products for a while, did a stint at now defunct MasPar Computer (a maker of parallel supercomputers), and held a number of positions at Hewlett-Packard, where he worked for 16 years. San Francisco-based Palamida was founded in 2003 (it doesn't say when), and has picked Tolliver as its first CEO.

Back in February at the LinuxWorld show in Boston, Palamida started talking about IP Amplifier and also said that Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, WaldenVC, and Stanford University had together kicked in $5 million of Series A venture funding to get Palamida going. The software has two components, an IP detector and a compliance library, which Palamida says covers over 40,000 open source projects and includes more than 38 million code snippets that can identify both open source and closed source software being used to create applications by developers. The library includes snippets of source and binary code, which means it can sniff around inside compiled applications running on existing systems as well as inside the source code that developers are cranking out. IP Amplifier can also sniff through icons, images, text documents, and XML documents, says Palamida.

IP Amplifier 3.0 is available now, and is licensed on an annual subscription basis for an unlimited number of users. Prices range from $50,000 to $250,000 a year, with the pricing scaling based on the size of their organization. The price obviously includes updates to the compliance library. IP Amplifier runs on a company's own servers and is itself an application that can run on Linux, Unix (including the top three Unixes--Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX--as well as Mac OS X, which is Unix at heart), and Windows.

The IP Amplifier product competes with Black Duck's new protextIP OnDemand, which is a hosted version of its protexIP software. With the regular protexIP offering, you pay Black Duck a licensing fee and then additional charges based on the amount of code you have under the management of the protexIP product. With the OnDemand version, which costs less, you pay Black Duck based on the amount of code you scan through the online system. It costs $3,000 for 10 MB of scans, $6,250 for 25 MB of scans, $12,500 for 50 MB of scans, $18,750 for 75 MB of scans, and $25,000 for 100 MB of scans. If you are scanning more than 75 MB of code, you might as well go for the full, on-site, multi-user version of the protexIP software. The protexIP OnDemand service can only be used by a single user for a single project, and it is only available on a 90-day term.

RELATED STORY

Black Duck Launches Online IP Service