Software bill of materials (SBOM) solutions generate, ingest, manage, and monitor a machine-readable inventory of the components within software supply chains. The components covered include libraries, packages, modules, associated licenses, and more. Companies and developers use SBOM software to deliver and annotate comprehensive SBOMs for their software’s third party and open source components .
These solutions allow users to comply with government mandates that require the provision of a minimum SBOM. Maintaining and monitoring SBOMs also helps companies perform continuous risk assessments, though vulnerability remediation is not the primary focus of such tools. software composition analysis (SCA) tools scan software supply chains’ components and dependencies at the code level to identify and remediate security vulnerabilities, whereas SBOM software automates the standardized presentation of those elements for transparency, observability, and compliance.
To qualify for inclusion in the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) category, a product must:
Automatically ingest and generate SBOMs in standard formats like CycloneDX and SPDX
Continuously monitor and update SBOMs based on component versions, associated licenses, dependencies, and more
Alert users of non-compliant elements in their software supply chain
Allow users to annotate SBOMs
Facilitate compliance with government regulations