Irvine, California-based Rainbow Technologies Inc, the market leader in software protection keys – or dongles as they are popularly known – has acquired all the outstanding shares of one of its biggest competitors, Software Security Inc of Darien, Connecticut, along with those of its UK-based subsidiary Software Security International Ltd. Rainbow paid for the transaction, to be accounted for as a pooling of interests, with 341,000 shares of Rainbow Common Stock. Privately-held SSI was formed in 1982, and claims to have shipped over two million of its UniKey family of its software protection devices securing around 3,000 applications. Rainbow, two years younger than SSI, has sold some nine million of its Sentinel keys, though more recently it has been expanding in the direction of network applications licensing and communications encryption. รก
