Black Duck Software accesses critical IBM resources to extend global reach and win hundreds of thousands of dollars in new business

How IBM Business Partner benefits help Black Duck Software:

• IBM Rational Conference resulted in $500,000 in new business

• Sales Connections increased reach into emerging markets

• Virtual Innovation Centers enabled joint IBM and Black Duck product demonstrations worldwide

• Seminar yielded $700,000 in qualified prospects

Large enterprises and increasingly small and medium business ones in virtually every industry across the globe are leveraging open source software to build applications, some for internal use and some for distribution.

Open source software often is developed collaboratively, and the source code is made available to users as public domain, or under a copyright license. This permits developers to use, change and improve the software, and to redistribute it.

“Companies want to use open source, but they don’t necessarily have policies, practices or expertise in place for managing it,” said Frank Curran, director of business development of Black Duck Software, an IBM Advanced Business Partner.

Curran noted there are critical licensing issues associated with distributing open source. “For instance, a company may not know they have to open source their own code if they add to an open source project, so they end up losing their intellectual property and market share,” Curran said. “That’s why they call us. They want to consume open source, but they want to use it in a safe and efficient way.”

In 2004, Black Duck became an IBM Business Partner. In 2006, the company actively began leveraging the marketing and technical benefits IBM provides.

As a result, Black Duck has won $500,000 in new business from a new customer, been provided with several qualified sales leads and been able to demonstrate its products at an IBM Innovation Center.

Since Black Duck integrates with IBM Rational® products, which act as repositories for source code and platforms for governing the software development lifecycle, Curran was intent on taking advantage of those synergies.

Since its inception in 2002, Black Duck, which is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, has been offering its clients worldwide access to a knowledge base of hundreds of thousands of open source projects and licenses, a knowledge base the company developed, maintains and tracks.

“We save organizations time, energy and workflow by collaborating with their development managers, lawyers, program managers and architects to identify the open source they need, where they can find it, any issues related to its use and how to manage it,” Curran said.

Expands global reach through Sales Connections

Curran continued: “IBM customers are our customers. We handle the application development using open source, and
Rational provides quality, change and process management during development. IBM is the industry leader in that space, so the IBM brand can certainly open some doors.”

Black Duck exhibits annually at the Rational Development Conference and closed a $500,000 deal with a major U.S. insurance company from a conference lead. Black Duck also teams with Rational product managers to present a series of international “Rational Comes to You” events.

At these events, attendees in strategic markets, such as China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Japan and Taiwan, will hear the joint Black Duck and Rational value proposition. The events are co-funded by IBM, which also encourages attendance via telemarketing and Web and print promotions to Rational users.

Curran said his company finds IBM Sales Connections an invaluable program for identifying and expanding relationships with IBM sales reps in those same countries. “Those relationships have allowed us to sell jointly, targeting specific prospects, rather than chasing everybody in a particular country,” Curran said.

Curran sees the teaming of IBM and Black Duck as a springboard to long-term gains for both companies, domestically and internationally. “It provides us with an ability to build relationships with IBM salespeople and work with them to develop localized events.”

Curran cited as an example a recent seminar in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which netted $700,000 in qualified leads for his company.

Expands use of Innovation Centers
Black Duck intends to do many more localized events throughout the world and plans to use the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, as the venue whenever possible. “That gives us a beautiful facility, and the technology is all there, so if we want to demo our joint IBM and Rational products, we can do it very fast,” Curran explained.

Curran also plans to expand usage of IBM Virtual Innovation Centers. “An IBM sales rep contacted us and said he had four major customers that wanted to see a demonstration of how our products work together, so we are building a demo to be hosted through the Virtual Innovation Center.”

Black Duck employees often call on IBM architectural consultants to discuss integration issues. “We use them in two ways. We need to understand their product and use, so that we can understand how to position our product,” Curran said. “And we also ask them to educate us about certain products and talk about how we can jointly represent our products,” he said.

Going forward, Curran envisions a more comprehensive marketing teaming with IBM. “Our involvement as an IBM Business Partner has produced millions of dollars in opportunities and has enabled us to extend our global reach,” he said.