Our History


Milestones

  • 1996 - Company founded as Java consultancy
  • 1998 - Release DashO 1.0 for Java application optimization and protection
  • 2000 - First 100 clients
  • 2002 - Selected by Microsoft as exclusive obfuscation technology supplier
  • 2003 - Released Dotfuscator for .NET application protection and optimization
  • 2003 - Dotfuscator Professional 1.0 and Dotfuscator Community Edition inside Visual Studio 2003
  • 2004 - First 1,000 clients 2005: Microsoft extends exclusive relationship for Visual Studio 2005
  • 2006 - Established European Headquarters in Paris, France
  • 2006 - Exceed 2,500 global clients
  • 2007 - Global application risk management solution adopted by financial and manufacturing enterprises
  • 2007 - Microsoft extends exclusive relationship for Visual Studio 2008
  • 2007 - Entrepreneur Program launched to support ISV innovation
  • 2007 - Launch Runtime Intelligence Service for .NET
  • 2008 - Application Shelf-life is launched to automate application lifecycle management
  • 2008: Microsoft expands exclusive relationship for Visual Studio 2010 to include Runtime Intelligence
  • 2009 - Dotfuscator Suite replaces Dotfuscator Professional maintaining alignment with Visual Studio 2010
  • 2009 - Runtime Intelligence Service extended to support Java applications
  • 2009 - PreEmptive Solutions client list exceeds 4,000 with over 700 ISV entrepreneur program members

PreEmptive Solutions was founded in 1996 to help launch the Java wave through training and consulting services. As part of this effort, we worked on creating a commercial Java optimization product, DashO that would help ensure that Java applications would be “enterprise-worthy”. Early clients included Sun Microsystems and IBM. At the time, we had no idea that one of the “side-effects” of good Java optimization would ultimately give rise to an entirely new application security market. As Java runtimes became increasingly efficient and Java applications became increasingly valuable, the need for optimization declined and the requirement for protecting application intellectual property increased. Within a few short years, DashO emerged as the first commercial Java “obfuscator” and PreEmptive Solutions mission to protect and increase the value of application development investments was firmly in place.

As we were establishing DashO as the market leading Java obfuscator, Microsoft was preparing for the next major release of their answer to Java; the .NET framework with Visual Studio. Recognizing that reverse engineering of managed code was now a well-understood risk, Microsoft selected PreEmptive Solutions to provide Visual Studio’s obfuscation technology. In 2003, the Dotfuscator family was born. The first family members included the Community Edition (CE) embedded inside Visual Studio and the Professional Edition designed to meet the demands of the professional development organization.

Today, PreEmptive Solutions stands as the only obfuscation solution provider for both Java and .NET and is the market leader in both. But this is only the beginning of the PreEmptive Solutions story.

As our client-base grew beyond the first wave of Java and .NET software vendors to include financial, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and other Global 2,000 enterprises, it became increasingly clear that obfuscation alone was not sufficient to effectively manage the risks that stem from reverse engineering. These risks include IP theft, operational disruption and regulatory risk through vulnerability exploits and revenue loss through piracy.  While continuing to invest in our patented obfuscation technology, PreEmptive Solutions:

  • Expanded our R&D investments to optimally support commercial development processes (debugging, patch management, distributed development),
  • Added additional controls including tamper defense, watermarking and application lifecycle enforcement services to provide risk management beyond the build and throughout an application’s lifecycle,
  • Established a world-class support organization able to meet the demands of organizations that depend on mission-critical applications, and
  • Developed (and continuously improve) best practices to assess and manage the risks that stem from unauthorized access to applications and their source code.

Just as application optimization led us to application protection, and protection led to effective risk management solutions, risk management led us almost immediately to business intelligence and performance management. We could not assess risk without understanding the value of what was at risk. The investments we were making in assessing application risk could also be put to immediate use in improving how software is developed and measuring the business impact of application adoption.

In 2007, PreEmptive Solutions helped to establish another technology market; Runtime Intelligence (RI). Unlike exception or network monitoring, Runtime Intelligence solutions act as a spoke in a “business intelligence wheel” providing critical insight for technology providers (development, product, and sales management) as well as enterprise consumers (line of business executives and IT operations).

PreEmptive Solutions’ launched the Runtime Intelligence Service: a cloud-based service that aggregates, manages, analyzes and reports on application and feature adoption and usage.  In order to simplify application monitoring and to allow the monitoring of virtually every .NET or Java application ever written (not just future applications), Dotfuscator and DashO were both extended to inject instrumentation technology into executables post-build, e.g. after compile time.

The emergence of Runtime Intelligence as a new application development discipline did not go unnoticed by Microsoft. In 2008, Microsoft announced that it would be replacing the Dotfuscator Community Edition found in Visual Studio 2003, 2005 and 2008 with the Dotfuscator Software Service Community Edition – a post-build component that includes, for the first time in any development environment, the ability to inject session and feature monitoring, end of life behaviors and tamper defense.

Already in 2009, Microsoft has shipped beta versions of Visual Studio 2010 that include Runtime Intelligence functionality and commercial clients of our Runtime Intelligence Service include ISVs, computer equipment manufacturers, and medical device manufactures.  Today, with over 4,000 corporate clients, software on millions of developer desktops, and our implementation of Runtime Intelligence soon to be a de facto standard on both the .NET and Java developer desktop, we are excited and energized as we continue on our core mission to protect and increase the value of our clients’ application development investments – or, put succinctly, to help applications succeed.