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Futuremark becomes part of Underwriters Laboratories

by on05 November 2014

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Acquisition surprise

Futuremark, a company best known for its 3DMark and PCMark benchmarks is now a part of Underwriters Laboratories, a US-based global independent safety science company that has been around for over a century.

Futuremark, a company founded back in 1997 in Finland, previously also known as Mad Onion, has now become an owned subsidiary of Underwriters Laboratories (UL), as a result of an acquisition which closed on October 31.

According to Stephen Kirk, VP and GM of UL Consumer Technology Division, embedded software has become an important part of product design and with an increased focus on mobility, more and more products are becoming connected, making the Internet of Things a reality. As a result, software quality has become a rather important part of product safety and performance and benchmarking is an important way to help improve the performance of products. “This acquisition provides us with an opportunity to build a new business line in testing a wide variety of technological devices so they offer the performance, safety and privacy that consumers expect."

UL plans to increase investement in Futuremark's product developement with a bigger focus on professionaly-oriented benchmarks, similar to current Futuremark's PCMark suite.

Jukka Mäkinen, CEO of Futuremark noted that in recent years, the company has expanded to new platforms and while its software has been adopted by both the European Commission as well as national goverments and the company accomplished a lot on its own, they will be in an even better position to achieve their goals with UL. Futuremark and its current and future benchmarks will benefit from UL's labs, quality assurance and marketing.

According to Futuremark, the new acquisition will have no impact on the company and its employers or the current lineup of benchmarks.

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Last modified on 05 November 2014
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