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Image: Flexera Acquires Open Source Application Security Provider, Palamida

We have some exciting news to announce today. Flexera has just acquired Palamida, a major provider of Software Composition Analysis solutions for open source software.

This is terrific news for Flexera, our customers and partners. Our business sits at the nexus between the world’s software producers and buyers – repairing the broken software supply chain, which is the most dysfunctional supply chain in all of business today.  That dysfunction manifests as risk and cost – to both the producers of software and the enterprises that buy software – as they solve the complex, time consuming, and expensive problems of ensuring licensing compliance and security from vulnerabilities.

We estimate that the cost to software producers and their customers as a result of the broken software supply chains is many tens of billions of dollars per year globally.  And that’s just looking at commercial software.  Organizations are only just now beginning to look more closely at the costs and risks of open source – and the scope of the problem is dazzling. This acquisition is a natural fit for us, extending our ability to help customers manage the compliance and security risk inherent in the under-managed, uncharted world of open source software components.

Risky, Unmanaged Open Source Software is Everywhere

First, some background will help.  Open source software is used extensively by virtually all software developers – whether they are commercial software vendors, intelligent device and Internet of Things (IoT) manufacturers, or developers within other types of enterprises or government agencies that build their own proprietary applications for use in-house or for the benefit of their customers. Despite its ubiquity, open source software is largely unmanaged.  Software developers frequently do not know or track what specific open source components have been incorporated into their software, whether that open source software is in compliance with licensing terms, and whether it contains any software vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers.

You may remember when the Heartbleed vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptography library sent waves of panic rippling through the software industry and enterprises around the world.  Software developers didn’t know enough about the open source components used in their own products to understand whether their software was vulnerable – and their customers using that software didn’t know either.  The scale of security and compliance risk in open source software is massive – and Flexera is committed to helping our customers reduce that risk in the same way we already do for proprietary software.”

Palamida’s Products & Synergies with Flexera Solutions

Palamida products include Enterprise Edition, which helps organizations desiring to establish an end-to-end solution to approve, scan and track open source and other third party code in their development projects and to stay current on license, vulnerability and other information about the software they use.  Standard Edition, designed for organizations focusing first on analysis of code content, contains the scanning and analysis features of Enterprise Edition. And Governance Edition, designed for organizations starting their compliance program with a focus on developer disclosure, contains the request and approval workflow features of Enterprise Edition.

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Software Vulnerability Management

The way to beat software vulnerabilities is to stay ahead of them. Addressing windows of risk is critical for reducing the odds of attacks and staying secure.

Palamida’s products are highly synergistic with Flexera’s solutions. For example, we build and maintain the world’s most comprehensive software vulnerability intelligence database to power our Software Vulnerability Management solutions.  That database will be extended to cover more open source software components and libraries.  Having enriched, verified open source vulnerabilities and information on remediation actions (i.e. patches, upgrade, etc.) differentiates Palamida’s solutions from others in the market that use only the free repositories.

Overtime, there will be integration with our Software License Optimization and Vulnerability Management solutions aimed at the Software Asset Management (SAM) and Security teams.  Discovery and inventory will be enhanced to scan deployed software packages in order to identify open source vulnerabilities contained in third party and internally developed applications. AdminStudio will also be enhanced to identify open source use and vulnerabilities inside the packages of third party installers.

You’ll be hearing a lot more from us about open source compliance and vulnerability management in the days and weeks ahead!  And in the meantime, let us know your thoughts!