Q1 Labs - QRadar - A University of New Brunswick spinout whose security intelligence software became IBM QRadar, and then two products with two owners.

Q1 Labs was founded in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in 2001 as a spinout from the University of New Brunswick, and by the time IBM bought it in 2011 it was based in Waltham, Massachusetts, with a strong presence still in Fredericton. Its product, QRadar, was what the trade called security intelligence: log, threat and compliance management, with flow and event processors that read network and security events and network and application flow data, sold to 1,800 clients.

IBM announced the acquisition on 4 October 2011, financial terms undisclosed, and closed it on 26 October 2011. Q1 Labs' chief executive, Brendan Hannigan, became general manager of a newly formed IBM Security Systems division, which is a tell about what IBM was buying: not a product line to slot into an existing portfolio, but the centre of a new one.

Thirteen years later the product split. On 4 September 2024 Palo Alto Networks completed the acquisition of IBM's QRadar Software as a Service assets, offering eligible customers free migration to its Cortex XSIAM platform with IBM Consulting's help, while QRadar clients who wished to remain on the on-premises product continued to receive IBM features and support. One name, two owners, two futures: the cloud version became a migration path into a competitor's platform and the on-premises version stayed where it was.

The record keeps the company because the pattern recurs on this timeline. A regional university spinout builds the product a category needs, a giant buys it to found a division, and a decade later the product is worth more as a customer list than as code. The engineers in Fredericton who wrote the flow processors are the part of the story that the two press releases leave out.

From the company

This company no longer trades under this name. Now part of IBM, which acquired Q1 Labs in 2011 and still sells QRadar on premises; the QRadar SaaS assets went to Palo Alto Networks in 2024.

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