About Kitware
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Kitware, Inc. is a leader in the creation and support of open-source software and state of the art technology, and is one of the fastest growing software companies in the country. Kitware leverages its open-source communities and diverse technical expertise to provide advanced custom solutions for a host of complex technical problems.

Founded in 1998, Kitware’s team is widely recognized for their major contributions to a variety of open-source software systems including the Visualization Tookit (VTK), the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), CMake and ParaView.

Kitware has made an impact in areas such as visualization, data publishing, medical imaging, quality software process, computer vision, and informatics. Among Kitware’s global customers and collaborators are a variety of academic research facilities, government institutions and private corporations worldwide. Kitware's products and services include collaborative R&D, software support, consulting, custom application development, and training and productivity tools that leverage our open-source systems.

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The Company was founded in 1998 by Will Schroeder, Ken Martin, Lisa Avila, Charles Law and Bill Hoffman. These founders were originally from GE’s Corporate R&D Center. Four of the five founders were co-workers in the Computer Graphics and Systems Program; Bill Hoffman was a member of the Image Understanding group.
 
The Company was initially founded to service the open source Visualization Toolkit VTK software. VTK was created by Will, Ken and Bill Lorensen as companion software to the textbook The Visualization Toolkit An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics, which was originally published by Prentice-Hall in 1995. In the second and later editions of the book, other authors were added to the book including Lisa Avila, Charles Law and Rick Avila. Because the software was released open source, a community rapidly grew up around it, and external groups including GE began contributing to it. By 1998, when the Company was founded, a sizable VTK community existed, and the Company was able to start its first year with a modest profit.
 
Another important milestone in the company history was the award of the National Library of Medicine Insight Toolkit contract in 1999. The consortium of six groups (three academic and three industrial, including Kitware) led directly to the creation of several important Kitware open source products including ITK, CMake, CTest, gccXML, and CableSWIG. Today ITK and CMake are vital to Company growth and exposure. Indeed, the Company is probably best known due to KDE’s adoption of CMake in 2006. Since that time the Company has been fortunate to have strong customer advocates such as Jim Ahrens at Los Alamos National Lab (who initiated the ParaView project), Brian Wylie at Sandia National Labs (ParaView and the information visualization effort), Terry Yoo at the National Library of Medicine (ITK and CMake), Jerry Clarke at the Army Research Labs (ParaView Enterprise Edition), and Ron Kikinis at Harvard Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Slicer and KWWidgets). We have also been fortunate to hire outstanding technical contributors who make the Company what it is today.

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Note: Use of the Kitware Logo is not an implied endorsement by Kitware, or its subsidiaries of your organization, tookit or project.

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Average yearly revenue growth over the past 5 years	31%
Employee Snapshot as of January 10, 2011
Employee Growth in 2010	31%
Percentage of our R&D team at the Ph.D. level	42%
Percentage of our R&D team at the Masters level or above	84%

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average number of monthly visits based on Google Analytics

http://www.kitware.com	18,600
http://www.vtk.org	24,200
http://www.itk.org	12,600
http://www.paraview.org	16,900
http://www.cmake.org	83,900
http://www.cdash.org	1,750

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