Infoworld has an interview with the CEO of Black Duck Software, Douglas Levin, a former Microsoft executive, About the Company and issues pertaining to intellectual property and open source.

Excerpts from the same:

InfoWorld: Could you explain the services that Black Duck offers?
Levin: We are not a really a services company, we're a product company. Black Duck offers a collaboration platform that enables companies to identify their intellectual property during the software development process. It's designed to accelerate software development and enable companies to reuse more software safely and under controlled conditions. The name [of the platform] is protexIP/Development. We have two versions of it. One is for the enterprise, which is a multi-user, multi-role, and multi-site deployment, [and there is also] protexIP/Development Professional Edition, and that's for a single user at a single site. Those are on-premises solutions. So they are installed on a server at the enterprise site. Alternatively, we have an on-demand offering ... hosted and accessible through the Internet.

InfoWorld: How does your product work?
Levin: For the enterprise, the most important consideration is a configurable IP. What I mean by IP of course is intellectual property, [a] policy management module, which permits or prohibits components and licenses. Plus, there is an advance code identification module, which uses a number of techniques, and this is related to your question about secret sauce. It's snippet-matching, file-matching, string search, and dependency analysis, which all go into an analytical engine that automates license identification and IP analysis.

InfoWorld: Who are some of your biggest customers?
Levin: Well I don't know [who] the latest referenceable customers are, and we can definitely get back to you on it, but we've named some if them. [They include] the Navy, Samsung, [and] we have a couple of banks.

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai