Marketing maven takes CEO role at Sonatype

In what is likely the first of a series of moves to help expand the popularity and business behind the Maven open source build technology, Mark De Visser has joined Sonatype as CEO. Sonatype was formed by the developers of Maven, including project lead Jason Van Zyl and is backed by Hummer Winblad and Morganthaler Ventures.

Maven is an open source Apache project and is used by hundreds of companies to automate their build process, including the likes of Coca Cola, Bank of America, Toyota, Accenture, Intuit, and many others.

Unlike traditional source code management systems, Maven is savvy to the open source world and lets you deal with complex build dependencies that include both source and binary artifacts. Sonatype’s master repository tracks thousands of binary artifacts, including MySQL, app servers, and libraries like Spring, Struts, and so on.

Sonatype is committed to keeping Maven under an open source license but will also be adding new tools that make it easier for businesses to manage what can become pretty complicated in production environments. The first of these offerings will be based on the Maven repository manager, known as Nexus, adding new capabilities and a visual user interface. I expect there will be more added over time to provide workflow tools, security extensions, audit capabilities, multisite support, and more.

In effect, what Maven and Nexus provide is codified “best practices” that will help keep complex build process running smoothly. For anyone who has spent hours if not days trying to debug and correct a broken build system, Sonatype offers welcome relief. You may give up a bit of flexibility to use Maven, but in return you get a system that will keep you out of trouble.

I worked with Mark many years back at Borland, and he is one of the most strategic thinkers I know in the software tools space. He’s also had plenty of exposure to building both community and commerce at Red Hat and Zend. If there’s a way to disrupt the old-line vendors in this space, Mark will figure it out. Software builds are becoming more complex and the opportunity is certainly there to simplify things.

Kudos to Matt Asay, who first picked up on this news by monitoring LinkedIn profile updates. I better be careful what I post to Twitter.