Adrenaline, Cigital Team to Make Software 'Behave'

Two Washington-area software consultants, The Adrenaline Group and Cigital, are launching a service that sounds sort of like a "Ghostbusters" for software boogeymen.

Adrenaline and Cigital plan to announce July 30 that they have teamed up to create a service called Technology Project Rescue, a service that does just what it says -- saves failing software systems.

We're not talking about simple consumer applications like Microsoft Windows or Adobe Acrobat. D.C.-based Adrenaline (www.adrenaline.com) and Dulles-based Cigital (www.cigital.com) say they're targeting massive, customized software projects undertaken by major corporations. The rescue team will target projects that cost $10 million or more.

Adrenaline CEO Scott McLoughlin says the companies debated over the term "rescue" versus "recovery" in naming their service.

"The idea of 'rescue' has more action to it, while 'recovery' has an abstract genteelness to it," McLoughlin says. "The idea is to help Fortune 1000 enterprises implement practices that will rescue large, mission critical software applications that are late, over budget or have endemic quality problems."

The two companies already have a team of about 20 software engineers for Technology Project Rescue. The team is sort of "on call" to come in and save these multi million dollar projects from being late or failing. Adrenaline brings to the table a specialty in software project management and application development while Cigital is best known for looking at software and making risk assessments.

"We make software behave," says Cigital CEO Jeff Payne. "Our business has always been about helping people and fixing problems."

The rescue team figures it will generate $2 million to $3 million a year per project; the revenue split will depend on the project. The team will essentially come in, assess the problem and try to fix the software, while working with the existing project team.

The problem is one that costs corporations billions per year. According to an estimate by the Standish Group, nearly 74 percent of customized, enterprise-level software projects are done wrong or done late. Overall, corporations worldwide spend $350 billion a year developing customized software.

Although the software that corporations develop for internal use may not have the household names that consumers have come to know, they are the applications that run the guts of businesses these days.

There have been many high profile software failures in the past year that highlight what can go wrong with customized software. I2, a supply chain management firm, was blamed for Nike's profit shortfall earlier this year. Hershey's had a software failure that cost $200 million in revenue last year. And the NASA Mars Lander crashed as a result of one bad line of software code, costing NASA $360 million.

The value proposition is obvious," McLoughlin says. "The clients are about to throw away $20 [million] or $30 million on a project and we come in to rescue it."