Tripwire, Inc. is a software company based in Portland, Oregon that develops, markets and sells information technology for security and compliance automation.
History
The software was devised by Purdue University, graduate student Gene Kim, along with his professor, Gene Spafford, Its academic releasein 1992 pioneered many techniques used in intrusion detection and received widespread support among corporate, education, and government security professionals. In 1997, Gene Kim co-founded Tripwire, Inc. with rights to the Tripwire name and technology, and produced a commercial version, Tripwire for Servers. In 2000, Tripwire contributed source code functionally equivalent to the academic source release to the open source community to enable Open Source Tripwire. In 2005, the firm released Tripwire Enterprise, the company's flagship product for IT configuration control by detecting, assessing, reporting and remediating file and configuration changes. In January 2010, it announced the release of Tripwire Log Center, log and security information and event management software that stores, correlates and reports log and security event data. The two products can be integrated to enable correlation of change and event data. August 21, 2009, the firm acquired Activeworx technologies from CrossTec Corporation. That includes Log Center, Security Center, Event Management, and Snort Management Center. Revenues grew to $74 million in 2009. In October 2009, the company had 261 employees; that number grew to 336 by June 2010. By May–June 2010, the company had over 5,500 customers. and had announced that it had filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. A year later, the company announced its sale to the private equity firmThoma Bravo LLC, ending its $86 million IPO plans. CEO Jim Johnson cited the firm's failure to reach the $100 million revenue milestone in 2010 as well as changing IPO market expectations as reasons for not going through with the IPO. The day following the acquisition, the company laid off about 50 of its 350 employees. Johnson expects the company will eventually go public, though it is unlikely to happen before 2015. With the acquisition of nCircle in 2013, the firm added asset discovery and vulnerability management to its portfolio. Tripwire IP360™ enables organizations to identify system vulnerabilities through advanced intelligence that prioritizes the most critical issues. In December 2014, Belden Inc announced plans to buy Tripwire for $710 million. The acquisition was completed on January 2, 2015. In 2016, Tripwire launched industrial cybersecurity capabilities. The reporting and analytics product Tripwire Connect also debuted in 2016. In 2017, the firm extended its core capabilities to cloud and DevOps security. This includes Tripwire Cloud Management Assessor and Tripwire for DevOps. It also launched its managed services Tripwire ExpertOpsSM, offerring vulnerability management, secure configuration management, and file integrity monitoring as a service.
