Raytheon [RTN] yesterday said it has acquired Pikewerks, a small firm that boosts its cyber security capabilities, particularly in the areas of insider threat protection, software protection and forensics.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although Raytheon said it would not be material to its earnings or sales in the current quarter or next year. Pikewerks is based in Alabama, has 40 employees and its key management and technical staff, including Sandy Ring, founder and president, and Michael Ring, CEO, will remain with the company.
In August Pikewerk’s made the Inc. 500/5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in the country, coming in at 955 with three-year growth of 320 percent.
Raytheon said that Pikewerks has two high demand products, Electronic Armor, which is an anti-exploitation software tool that protects executable files, and Second Look, a software capability for live, in-memory forensic analysis of operating systems.
Pikewerks’ customers are in the intelligence community, Defense Department and commercial sector.
In October, Pikewerks said it had received a two-year follow-on contract to develop anti-exploitation techniques capable of securing SCADA and industrial control system networks. The company’s web site also mentions a number of contracts with the Air Force, Army and Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Pikewerks also has one of industry’s largest repositories of kernel-level engineering talent on the Linux Operating System, Raytheon said.
“Developers at Pikewerks are experts who have taken technology from concept to deployment, and we are excited to welcome them as members of our innovative Raytheon team,” Lynn Dugle, president of Raytheon’s Intelligence and Information Systems business, said in a statement.
The purchase of Pikewerks is the ninth cyber-related acquisition by Raytheon since 2007.