Acquired: When success means saying good-bye

Today one of iMarc's showcase websites went off the air. We're sad to see it go, but for this client, taking the site down was the ultimate success.

Ounce Labs was a software company. Their flagship product could be used to identify security vulnerabilities in software source code. Ounce had some big clients including Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Navy.

When Ounce Labs came to iMarc, their website was highly technical. The content played to developers but ignored C-level executives.

Ounce laid out one of their primary goals to team iMarc: "position the company for acquisition".

After a couple months of planning, iMarc started production in February 2009.

We launched the new site in late March.

By the end of July, Ounce was acquired by IBM.

After 12 months of transition, IBM has fully integrated Ounce Labs. Today, the website went down. Now when you visit ouncelabs.com, you're redirected to IBM.

On one hand, it's sad to see a project disappear, but ultimately, we're happy that we played a small role in helping this great client achieve their goal.

At least we still have some pictures of our baby...

On a side note: Since Ounce's business was ensuring security, before engaging with iMarc, Ounce insisted in doing code audits of our web framework. Flourish, the PHP library we proposed, went through Ounce's suite of static code analysis and passed with flying colors. Coincidentally, Flourish is developed and maintained by our Senior Technical Architect, Will Bond. If you're a PHP developer interested in a security-focused web framework, check out http://flourishlib.com