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Tripwire Inc. was born in the dotcom era, but that's about all the connection the Portland-based company has with those IT soar-and-burn bubble years.
For one thing, it had a solid technology to work with. Eugene Spafford and Gene Kim wrote the Tripwire software while they were both at Purdue University, putting it out as an academic source release in 1992. When Kim co-founded Tripwire with Wyatt Starnes in 1997, the software was already widely known.
By the time the new company launched Tripwire 2.0 as its first commercial product in 1999 it also had a ready market. Organizations attracted to the potential of the Internet but spooked by the potential hazards were looking for more sophisticated ways to track breaches of network security, a need Tripwire met.
And now, as the economy recovers and those same organizations look to upgrade and improve their information technology systems, Tripwire plans to exploit yet another potential boom market as an essential part of companies' attempts to correctly manage those upgrades, a process known in IT circles as change management.
"We are now serving two critical markets," said Jim Johnson, the former head of Intel Corp.'s Oregon operations, who was handed the title of president and CEO at Tripwire last month. "Security is a must-have rather than a nice-to-have item, and the larger IT shops have [mission critical] systems that must stay up and be available at all times," even when undergoing change.
Tripwire's software continually monitors computer files and network devices to catch changes and compare them to...