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The back story

HP acquired SPI Dynamics last September, as the latter was locked in a legal battle with Cenzic.

Back in September 2006, SPI Dynamics had sued Cenzic for allegedly violating its method of locating vulnerabilities. In July 2007, Cenzic fired back with its own lawsuit, five months after getting a patent for its own vulnerability search method in February.

Last October, one month after HP bought SPI Dynamics, the lawsuits were settled, with HP and Cenzic agreeing to cross-license each others' technologies.

Developers heavily criticized Cenzic's suit. Many of them believed Cenzic's patent had no merit and that its countersuit was essentially a move to delay HP's acquisition of SPI Dynamics.

Still, HP's announcement did not impress Peter Christy, an analyst at Internet Research Group -- especially the SaaS part of it.

"HP is interested in SaaS, and it's of high strategic importance to HP Labs, and they were talking about offering printing as a service," he told InternetNews.com.

"They have competitors -- Cenzic -- that already offer vulnerability testing as a service rather than as software, so in this case, it's one specific HP business playing catch-up with the competition."
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