Vista Acquires a Majority Interest in Sonatype: A Great Day for our Customers, Partners and Community

November 18, 2019 By Wayne Jackson and Brian Fox

3 minute read time

The Sonatype journey started more than a decade ago, just as the concept of “open source” and componentized software development was gaining steam. From our humble beginning as core contributors to Apache Maven, to supporting Maven Central and serving billions of components annually to developers, to building the world’s deepest knowledge base of open source health and hygiene data, to helping thousands of enterprise engineering teams automatically find and fix open source vulnerabilities, we’ve pioneered the best practice of software supply chain management and reinvented how organizations use open source to build applications.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Vista Equity Partners (“Vista”) is acquiring a majority interest in Sonatype -- which means that our journey will continue alongside a powerful new strategic partner.

Sonatype_Vista_Timeline@2x (1)

Why Vista?

With more than 70,000 employees building and delivering software every single day across 60 portfolio companies, Vista is literally living in the shoes of software developers, application security folks, and ops managers.  They know first-hand the intense pressure felt by engineering teams everywhere to accelerate the pace of software innovation. They also know that every organization building software today is consuming massive amounts of open source, and must contend with the challenge that not all of these third-party components are high quality or trustworthy, and all of them age like milk, not like wine.

At Sonatype, our vision, strategy, and execution have long been focused on helping software engineering teams scale DevOps by automatically harnessing all of the good that open source has to offer, while minimizing the inherent risks.  Vista, perhaps more than anyone else in the world, understands our vision and appreciates the strategic importance of our mission. For this reason, they are the perfect organization for us to partner with as we continue to grow and scale.  

Customers, Partners, and Nexus Community Members.

Day-to-day we will continue to operate the same as we always have, except now we will have the backing of a very large and sophisticated partner.

With Vista at our side, our energy and resources will remain laser focused on delivering innovative products, empowering customers, supporting our partners, and fostering a vibrant Nexus community.  Whether you’re using Nexus Repository Manager, Nexus Lifecycle, Nexus Firewall, Nexus Auditor or the full Nexus Platform -- you can be certain that we will continue to deliver the same great products and world class support that you’ve come to know and love.

Also, in regards to the community, we will continue to invest in and cultivate our popular and long standing projects like Central Repository and Nexus Repository Manager OSS.  And you should expect that we will continue to contribute new innovations like Sonatype Nancy, Sonatype Goalie, Sonatype DepShield (a GitHub integration), and OSS Index for purposes of helping front-line developers build more secure code, with less hassle.

Thank you, Thank You, Thank You

Finally, we want to take this opportunity to thank each and every customer for putting your trust in us over the last decade and bringing us to where we are today.  We come to work everyday for you. Our engineers, our product owners, our data scientists, our technical support team, our customer success team, our account managers -- we’re all driven to help you succeed and make building software easier and more secure.  This commitment is stronger than ever during this exciting time.

To read the full press release please click here.

Tags: featured, News and Views, Corporate Momentum

Written by Wayne Jackson and Brian Fox

Wayne is the CEO of Sonatype, a role he has held since 2010. Brian is co-founder and CTO of Sonatype.