Cenzic and NT OBJECTives, both firms that focus on application security solutions, today announced that they have settled an ongoing legal battle that has been rolling for most of this year.
Cenzic originally filed a lawsuit against Orange County, California based NT OBJECTives for patent infringement in February 2011.
The Patent in question, entitled “Fault Injection Methods and Apparatus,” covers what Cenzic says are critical aspects of its “trailblazing technology”, including “some of the company’s most sought-out intellectual property — fault injection patterns, target site traversal baselines and mutations of request grammars.”
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Cenzic’s Patent No. 7,185,232 in 2007, granting Cenzic the right to exclusively certain technology found in security assessment scanners. Cenzic originally filed for the patent in February 2002.
Other companies, including IBM and HP, have cross-licensed Cenzic’s patent in the past. In the case of the HP agreement, the original suit came with an acquisition of SPI Dynamics, a company that HP acquired about a month before it settled the litigation with a patent licensing agreement.
Today’s announced settlement results in another “win” for Cenzic, as NT OBJECTives has agreed to pay Cenzic an undisclosed amount in exchange for certain rights to Cenzic’s United States Patent numbers 7,185,232 and 7,620,851.The patent license agreement between the two security firms settles all patent litigation between them, including the withdrawal of claims around patent ownership surrounding Web application security solutions. The agreement also grants NT OBJECTives a patent license from Cenzic for further use of the technology.
“We are pleased with the outcome of this agreement,” said John Weinschenk, President and CEO at Cenzic. “Granting NT OBJECTives the license to use elements of our intellectual property is a benefit to the security industry as a whole. We look forward to working alongside them and any other companies searching for the best Web security solutions on the market.”
Additional details of the settlement were not disclosed.