Black Duck Reckons Open Source Popularity Helped Its Q1 Growth

Black Duck Software has announced that it has registered 42 percent growth in bookings performance and 27 percent growth in services for the first quarter of 2009, and owes its success to the growing trends of Open Source Software (OSS) acceptance and usage.

The down economy is forcing companies to look at new ways to cut costs so that profit margins are sustained or, at the bare minimum, exist. One globally accepted cost cutting method is the adoption of OSS and this has led to Black Duck procuring significant business with three global enterprises and signing deals with existing and 18 new clients to take its customer base to 640.

"Interest in open source software is accelerating, but more importantly adoption is accelerating and that's what drives our business," said Tim Yeaton, President and CEO, Black Duck Software (News - Alert). "We see customer interest in expanded OSS use, as well as the need for management tools to ensure effective automation of what are typically cumbersome and error-prone manual methods for search, selection, validation, and ongoing monitoring of OSS. These factors, along with the customer need to continue innovation even in a tight budget climate, contributed to our continued growth."

TMCnet had earlier reported that even the military is strongly considering OSS adoption as a money saving option when compared with current costly proprietary OS’s. Another TMCnet report commented on how long the government can hold out against the benefits of open source voting applications when compared with proprietary solutions.

Black Duck claims it had several milestones this past quarter inducting highly experienced staff such as Timothy Yeaton as CEO and Philip Odence as VP of Business Development, the release of Black Duck Suite that is a total OSS management solution, and an additional $9.5 million in venture funds with return investments for all current investors.

The company says that it provides products and services for accelerating software development through the identification, commissioning, and management of OSS that depends on the needs of the customer such as security and license compliance, the role requirements such as acquisition and export encryption, and industry type such as embedded computing and enterprise level information technology.

It also added that it continued improving its OSS search engine, Koders.com and built it 30 percent more than it was in Q408 to 2 billion lines of OSS. Koders.com helps the developers’ community to locate, use and even reuse components of OSS. TMCnet had earlier reported that the estimated code reuse saved more than 316,000 staff years, which in turn translates to tens of billions of dollars in development cost savings.