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Maven Mavens Move From Mergere


Service and support company stopped offering service and support

By Alex Handy
May 15, 2007 — 
When Jason van Zyl originally released Maven in 2004, he wasn’t expecting to make money on his code; he simply wanted to improve upon ANT, the open-source build tool. Two years later, when he signed on to work for Mergere—then a new company from the creator of Gluecode that promised to support Maven users in enterprises—van Zyl was excited to turn his hobby into a paying job.

SONATYPE IS LAUNCHED
But six months ago, van Zyl set out on his own, disillusioned with the evolving business strategy of Mergere and its parent company, SimulaLabs. And last month, he drew the curtains back on his new Maven support company, Sonatype.

Sonatype is a bit like Mergere 2.0, with van Zyl and some other former Mergere employees concentrating on rebuilding the pieces that they felt Mergere bungled. Sonatype will offer service, support and training for Maven users, and will partner with industry vendors to build plug-ins and crossover projects to integrate Maven into the larger build process. Meanwhile, van Zyl’s former employer is changing its name and refocusing Mergere on building the pieces of a SOA stack.

“All along, the basic problem was people coming from a non-open source background and trying to work at an open source company. We ended up using [a book van Zyl wrote about Maven before signing on with Mergere] as a marketing tool, and not as an education tool,” said van Zyl.

As such, van Zyl is now working on another Maven book, this time with publisher O’Reilly Media. He said that, rather than using this one as a marketing tool, he’ll give away less-technical sections of the book online as a way to spark interest in the project, not just the company.

But the book flap at Mergere was only part of van Zyl’s problem there. “I was the figurehead. They wanted the founders [of Maven] to be involved, [but] ultimately, we didn’t have much control over the business strategy,” said van Zyl. “There was never really any product strategy. Walking around the conferences, you would always get the feeling people were a little uneasy” with what the company was doing.

That could be the reason that Winston Damarillo, CEO of SimulaLabs, is changing his company’s name and refocusing it on SOA. On April 30, Damarillo rebranded SimulaLabs as DevZuz, after the sale on April 10 of another of his companies, LogicBlaze, to Iona.

Michael Goulde, an analyst with Forrester Research, said that he’s not heard any complaints in the marketplace about Mergere just yet. He did, however, say that Damarillo has a reputation for building and selling businesses quickly. “He does have a business factory there. He sold Gluecode and LogicBlaze. That doesn’t exactly make for a high-quality business,” said Goulde.

But Damarillo now readily admits that Mergere is no longer a straight service-and-support company. He said that the products Mergere has built on top of Maven will form the basis for DevZuz’s new business model.

“Mergere will be part of the core of DevZuz and stay there,” said Damarillo. “The first part is Mergere Maestro. It has within it a binary repository engine. It’s a takeoff from the Maven repository with the Apache archiver on it. It’s a single place where enterprises can store, inside the firewall, multiple components and put metadata on them, and then store them in sandboxes that they can lead testing against.”

Damarillo added that Mergere may even send clients to Sonatype. “We think the support and training over components should be done by companies like Sonatype,” he said.

“We’ll train consultants; we’ll train training companies. We’re going to license our training materials. We’re working with people like SourceLabs to try and create validated repositories,” said van Zyl, adding that partnerships will play a big role in how Sonatype evolves.

“We have a lot of partners who are interested. [Maven is] rapidly replacing ANT as the de facto build tool. We have more requests for training partners than we can really keep up with,” said van Zyl.

That seems to mirror what Goulde has seen in the marketplace. “There’s interest in Maven. Companies that are using a substantial number of open source projects and tools generally find Maven in there,” said Goulde.


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