Tripwire, Inc. is a software company based in Portland

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

, Oregon

Oregon

Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...

 that develops, markets and sells information technology (IT) security and compliance automation solutions. The company's products provide organizations control over physical and virtual IT infrastructure. Tripwire products are used in both the private and public sectors worldwide.

Background

While a graduate student at Purdue University

Purdue University

Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...

, Gene Kim, Tripwire’s co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer, along with his professor, Dr. Eugene Spafford

Gene Spafford

Eugene Howard Spafford , commonly known as Spaf, is a professor of computer science at Purdue University and a leading computer security expert....

, created the initial version of the software in 1992. This academic source release pioneered many techniques now used in intrusion detection

Intrusion detection

In Information Security, intrusion detection is the act of detecting actions that attempt to compromise the confidentiality, integrity or availability of a resource. When Intrusion detection takes a preventive measure without direct human intervention, then it becomes an Intrusion-prevention...

 and received widespread support among corporate, education, and government security professionals.

History

In 1997, Gene Kim co-founded Tripwire, Inc. The rights to the Tripwire name and technology were attained, and a commercial version of the product, Tripwire for Servers was released soon thereafter. In 2000, Tripwire contributed source code functionally equivalent to the academic source release to the open source community to enable Open Source Tripwire.

In 2004, Tripwire released the first version of Tripwire Enterprise, the company’s flagship product designed to help organizations with IT configuration control by detecting, assessing, reporting and remediating file and configuration changes. In January 2010, Tripwire announced the release of Tripwire Log Center, a log and security information and event management (SIEM) solution that stores, correlates and reports log and security event data. The two products can be integrated to enable correlation of change and event data. Tripwire Enterprise and Tripwire Log Center are software products in what Tripwire has named the Tripwire VIA suite.

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

Private equity

Private equity, in finance, is an asset class consisting of equity securities in operating companies that are not publicly traded on a stock exchange....

 firm Thoma Bravo

Thoma Bravo

Thoma Bravo, LLC. is a private equity firm specializing in investing in middle-market companies in fragmented and consolidating industries. The firm and its predecessor firms are generally credited with devising the concept of consolidating companies in fragmented industries, according to the Wall...

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.