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Recently dropped in on the press conference announcing HP’s acquisition of SPI Dynamics, Inc., which they plan to integrate into HP’s Technology Solutions Group, and which will be completed by the third quarter of this year.

Anyone notice a similarity with IBM’s purchase of Watchfire? SPI Dynamics enables customers to assess and identify security vulnerabilities along the entire lifecycle of web applications, which is quite similar to Watchfire. SPI Dynamics currently employs 140 people and has 1,000 customers worldwide. HP emphasized that one of the critical aspects of this deal was the SPI talent they'd be getting, and said they fully intend to continue the often leading-edge vulnerability research of SPI Labs.

When questioned about the timing of the deal just a week after IBM's announcement, HP said it was purely coincidental, in that they have had a five year relationship with SPI Dynamics, and have been in talks for months. And while HP said they didn’t see themselves moving as strongly into security applications as some of the more established players, they did say they saw application security testing as crucial to their commitment to the enterprise software space.

This is evidence of a growing trend in the security industry: with compliance growing ever-stricter with application security, and with more applications becoming web-based, that means that security will continue to move up the lifecycle of application development, and both application development and security will become more integrated. It also doesn't hurt that, as was brought up in both the IBM and HP press conferences, this is one of the fastest growing sectors in security.

In my estimation, the application security testing sector will only continue to heat up. And where there's heat, there's gold.

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