Black Duck Software, a global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software, today announced that its customer base has grown 142 percent in the twelve month period ending March 2008.

 

Black Duck products are now being used by Palm, Inc. (News - Alert) and Attivio, two companies with a highly regarded track record of innovation. 11 of the 25 largest software companies, as measured by Software Magazine, have chosen Black Duck solutions.

 

In addition to a growing customer base, a Black Duck survey also showed tremendous growth in activity per customer. Over the last 11 months, the amount of code Black Duck regularly scans, across all customers, has increased by nearly 800 percent.

Black Duck also announced today that protexIP 4.5, the latest version of the company's flagship product that helps control open source licensing and other policy issues during application development.

 

The most advanced code identification and analysis functionality on the market is included in protexIP 4.5. Together with Black Duck's extraordinary growth, the new product version demonstrates Black Duck's ongoing market leadership in open source code management throughout the software development lifecycle.

"The most successful software and technology companies are leveraging open source code in order to speed development and slash software development costs," said Douglas Levin, CEO of Black Duck Software. 

"When the world's largest development organizations want to ensure that open source usage conforms to their internal policies, they turn to Black Duck," added Levin.

"We selected Black Duck's protexIP solution to speed development by incorporating open source into Attivio AIE in the right way," said Sid Probstein, chief technology officer and co-founder of Attivio. "There's no question that the judicious use of open source software has helped us produce a next generation approach to unified information access, and Black Duck's products provide the framework to use open source effectively."

Some of the enhancements to protexIP 4.5 include new techniques for evaluating code, including string search of binary files, table of contents matching of archive files, and Java "package" matching. These new techniques afford greater precision and flexibility to software development teams reviewing their code for open source software.

Additionally, protexIP 4.5 integrates with Black Duck Code Center, a solution built to manage the use of open source during development and to provide a catalog of approved open source code that can be reused by development teams.

Black Duck Software enables companies to shorten time-to-market and reduce development and maintenance costs while mitigating the risks and challenges associated with open source reuse, including hidden license obligations, security vulnerabilities, unsupported open source and version proliferation. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Hong Kong, as well as distribution partners throughout the world.