Black Duck Software Buys Olliance Consulting Group

In its continued march across the open source industry landscape, Black Duck Software, a Boston-based company which services managed and secure implementations of open source software, announced today the purchase of Olliance Group, an open source enterprise consulting firm. After acquiring open source search engine Koders in 2008, Black Duck got quiet for a while then slurped up three more companies in the last three months -- Ohloh, SpikeSource, and now Olliance. We caught up wtih Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of Black Duck Software to find out more about this acquisition and what the future holds for the company.

According to Vescuso, the decision to purchase Olliance was a natural evolution in response to the changing needs of Black Ducks' customer base. "Over the last few years as our business has grown we’ve encountered more and more customers that not only needed a software platform to manage their use of open source components, but wanted help with business strategy around their use of open source, policy development, etc. Last year we formalized a partnership with Olliance to address this need which has been successful beyond our expectations. So much so that we realized for Black Duck to achieve its vision of being the company that organizations trust for all their FOSS-enablement needs, we needed to acquire Olliance, the leading consultancy in this area," says Vescuso.

Although Black Duck already offers some consulting services to clients, they are mainly focused on pre- and post-deployment support. Olliance's consulting services, on the other hand, help businesses map out how open source fits into a their overall business strategy "Black Duck’s services have been mostly focused on process integration and implementation, roll out, with some services for policy development," says Vescuso. "Olliance’s strength and deep knowledge developed over hundreds of customer engagements is in business strategy, policy and process, which is highly complementary to what we were offering, hence the motivation to acquire Olliance."

Vescuso won't confirm whether there are more acquisitions on Black Duck's horizon but does acknowledge the potential exists. "The four acquisitions we’ve made... provide the complete foundation for our business," he says. "We're not looking to add more 'categories' to our business, but we will consider future acquisitions to build depth and capability on top of this foundation."

Olliance Group's senior partner Greg Olsen moves onto Black Duck's personnel roster, while Andrew Aitken, founder of the Olliance Group, stays on as General Manager of the Olliance Group business unit and continues to oversee future Open Source Think Tank events. Further terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.