On July 5 2011, SmartBear Software announced the acquisition of Eviware, creators of the popular soapui and loadui web services testing tools. With the acquisition, SmartBear fills in the gap for automated web services testing tools as well as inherits over 800,000 soapui and loadui users.
SmartBear Software was created from a triple merger in mid 2010 which involved AutomatedQA, a Russian maker of test management software, and Pragmatic Software, a Denver development management software maker along with SmartBear. Joe Krivickas who then took over as CEO of SmartBear Software positioned the latest acquisition of eviware in line with the goals of the company:
We are excited to welcome all 800,000 soapUI and loadUI users to the SmartBear family. This is yet another important step this year on our mission to provide one of the world’s top three platforms for software quality and to deliver ‘Quality Anywhere’ to our users – on the desktop, mobile and in the cloud.
The SmartBear Quality Anywhere Platform includes code review tools, automated functional and load testing tools, performance monitoring tools and Application Lifecycle Management(ALM) tools which are used by over 100,000 users.
The latest June 2011 release of soapUI, version 4.0, added security scanning capability to assess web services for security vulnerabilities such as XML bomb, xpath and sql injection, cross site scripting and malicious attachments. SoapUI Pro is the enterprise version and contains additional features for power users including requirements traceability.
The SmartBear blog entry covering the acquisition addresses the combined customer base:
For all of our combined customers, it will be business as usual, with no changes in products or disruption in service. soapUI and loadUI customers will still be dealing directly with the new SmartBear business unit in Stockholm Sweden.