Sonatype, The Maven Company, appoints Mark de Visser as its new CEO as it prepares for the introduction of new commercial products and services
De Visser brings extensive experience with commercial open source to Sonatype, after years as senior executive at Red Hat and Zend Technologies
Mountain View, CA — November 12, 2008 — Sonatype, a leader in build and release infrastructure for software development, today announced the appointment of Mark de Visser as Chief Executive Officer. De Visser joins forces with Sonatype founder and CTO Jason van Zyl, creator of the open source Maven project, to help Sonatype expand the Maven ecosystem with professional products and services. Sonatype has developed products that enable companies that already use Maven, to turn their build and release infrastructure into a strategic asset – helping them deliver software projects faster, with fewer delays and higher quality.
“With 3.6 million annual downloads worldwide and tens of thousands of organizations who have deployed it, including a large majority of Fortune 500 companies, Maven clearly has become one of the most successful open source projects,” said Jason Van Zyl. “Companies now look at us, the creators of Maven, for commercial support, training, integration and further technologies. We needed a business leader to build Sonatype into the next great open source software company and were fortunate to find an executive of the caliber of Mark de Visser.”
De Visser joins Sonatype from Zend Technologies – the PHP company, where he held the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Prior to Zend, de Visser was the top marketing executive at Agitar – a Java testing company, at Red Hat – the Linux company, and at Borland – a developer tools company. His open source experience with Linux and PHP, and his extensive track record of launching successful products for software developers, make him uniquely qualified to lead Sonatype.
“Sonatype’s technical staff has done a remarkable job in creating a very widely adopted platform for build and release engineering,” said de Visser. “In the near future we will introduce commercial products to add even more capability to maven. These products are already being tested by select customers. We will also introduce training and support services for Maven. It is very exciting to be able to join a young company that already has such a vibrant user base to work for, and which has a clear plan for commercial success.”
“The old monolithic build and release model doesn’t work anymore,” said Paul Levine, Sonatype board member and former founding CEO of Atria Software, the company that introduced ClearCase® configuration management. “The future is with agile, open source solutions like Sonatype. There is a void in the marketplace and significant demand for a solution, and Sonatype’s enterprise customers validate the company’s ability to fill that void.”
About Sonatype
Sonatype is the leading contributor to the open source Apache Maven project, which is revolutionizing the way software development teams build and release their projects. Sonatype helps companies adopt Maven by offering a portfolio of value added products, consulting, training and support offerings. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Sonatype was founded in 2008 and is privately held, with investments from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Morgenthaler Ventures. For more information, please visit www.sonatype.com.
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