Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Imperva Sued By Competitor Over Patent

Redwood Shores-based Imperva, a maker of web application firewall products, has been sued by competitor F5 Networks, according to a legal filing by F5 Tuesday. According to the filing, in the Western Washington District Court, F5 is claiming that Imperva infringed on its U.S. Patent, No. 6,311,278, entitled "Method and System for Extracting Application Protocol Characteristics". F5 wants Imperva to stop making, using, selling or offering for sale any products that infringe upon that patent, including Imperva's Secure Sphere products, and also is looking for damages. Imperva is venture backed by Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, and Venrock. Neither firm has yet discussed the patent suit.