A Leading Developer of Software- Assurance Tools and Advanced Cyber-Security Solutions: GrammaTech

“Innovation is at the heart of GrammaTech. We are constantly pushing the boundaries of software research and development.”

GrammaTech was founded in 1988 to take academic research beyond proof of concepts to commercial products – products focused on helping teams identify and analyze software defects. GrammaTech helps their customers, partners, and government sponsors solve the most challenging software issues of today and tomorrow, safeguarding embedded mission-critical devices from failures and cyber attacks. With its security-first software design philosophy, GrammaTech helps its clients minimize corporate risks and maximizing competitive position.

Unlike other traditional tools vendors, GrammaTech’s mission balances a commercial business with a very strong research arm. The staff, including over 20 PhDs, is focused on the most challenging software issues impacting the embedded, M2M, and IoT equipment markets, through a consistent stream of highly innovative research programs that serve to advance techniques and technologies in software analysis, transformation, monitoring, and autonomic functions.

Software Assurance and Security Solutions
CodeSonar: GrammaTech’s flagship static analysis SAST tool, identifies bugs that can result in system crashes, unexpected behavior, and security breaches. CodeSonar has been proven to provide the deepest static analysis, finding more critical defects than other static analysis tools on the market. CodeSonar has performed best on several static analysis tool benchmarks in finding static memory, resource management, concurrency, and other defects. By analyzing both source code and binaries, CodeSonar enables teams to analyze complete applications, enabling customers to take control of the whole software supply chain and eliminate the most costly and hard-to-find defects early in the application development lifecycle. CodeSonar extends team scalability, improves quality, and instills confidence. CodeSonar for Binaries is an indispensible tool for organizations assessing their software supply chain risk, helping teams analyze what is being provided by third parties.
CodeSurfer: A software analyst tool for software understanding and vulnerability research. CodeSurfer allows analysts to quickly navigate software (both source and binary code), using various techniques to assess possible software issues.

It is all about customers anyway!
GrammaTech is focused on embedded and/or cyber-physical systems, developed with mission-critical requirements. GrammaTech clients span commercial, academic, and government sectors around the world. Some of these include: Airbus, BMW, GE, NASA, FBI, Sandia National Labs, Bosch, Canon, Samsung, Siemens, FDA, Boston Scientific, BT, Daimler, Korean Air, Panasonic, Hyundai, Toyota, US DoD, etc.

Boston Scientific is an example of one of their happy clients. Boston Scientific manufactures over 13,000 products worldwide. Among these offerings are safety-critical medical devices, including implantable cardiac rhythm management products. Recognizing the importance of static analysis as a complement to dynamic analysis and traditional software testing techniques, Boston Scientific included static analysis in their product development lifecycle; however, many of their static analyses were performed manually. Manual analysis is labor-intensive, but it was their only option because commercially available analysis tools that they had looked at didn’t offer the complex analysis functionalities needed. They required analyses to cover specific product design constraints alongside more general software quality checks.

Eager to automate more of their static analysis activities, Boston Scientific‘s engineers explored various options. They weren’t satisfied with the prospect of adopting an “off-the-shelf” tool and using its general-purpose analyses while waiting for the state-of-the-art in domain-specific analysis to evolve. Investigations with one analysis tool seemed to suggest that certain enhancements could be made, but its vendor was not interested in making those changes.

A solution came when they commissioned GrammaTech to develop a customized analysis suite. “Instead of waiting for the future to come, we recommend active participation in making it happen,” explains Boston Scientific Software Engineering Fellow Gerald Rigdon. “We partnered with GrammaTech because they combine a focus on innovation in static analysis with the expertise needed to turn innovation into workable reality.”

Meet the Executive Team

Dr. Tim Teitelbaum, Co-Founder and CEO: Tim brings over 40 years of experience in software design and analysis to the technology space. A co-founder of GrammaTech, Tim has led the company since its inception in 1988. Tim was a faculty member of the Computer Science Department at Cornell University from 1973 until his retirement in 2010. In 1978, he (along with GrammaTech co-founder Thomas Reps) created the Cornell Program Synthesizer, one of the seminal systems that established the viability of integrated language-based programming environments (IDEs). Tim received his Mathematics BS from MIT and his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Dr. Tom Reps, Co-Founder and President: Tom is well known for his work on static-analysis algorithms, including the invention of the attribute-grammar paradigm for incremental static-semantic analysis. In addition to being President of GrammaTech, Tom has been an active University of Wisconsin professor in the Computer Sciences Department since 1985. Reps has received numerous awards for his work, including the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Tom received his BA in Mathematics from Harvard and his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Paul Anderson, VP of Engineering: Paul is the leader of GrammaTech’s product engineering team. Paul has worked for GrammaTech for 24 years. He started as a software engineer working on language-sensitive editor technology, before leading the conception and development of both CodeSurfer and CodeSonar. During that time, Paul conducted research into a variety of software engineering tools and techniques, including program understanding and software visualization. Prior to joining GrammaTech, Paul was a lecturer at City University in London, England. Paul has a PhD in computer science from City University, and a BSc from King’s College, University of London.

Marc Brown, CMO and VP of Sales: Marc brings over 20 years of technology leadership experience to his role as Chief Marketing Officer. Before joining GrammaTech in June of 2015, Marc was the Group VP of Product and Solutions Marketing at Polycom, where he helped define and market Polycom’s Workplace of the Future. Prior to Polycom, Marc spent several years in the embedded software markets with Intel, Wind River Systems, and IBM, leading several marketing teams. Marc has a degree in Mathematics from the State University of New York.