History

At the end of 2006, Freddy Mallet realized that not only quality management was starting to become a critical activity for software development firms, but that there was currently no enterprise software available to meet this need.  In February 2007, Simon Brandhof started developing Sonar by integrating best-of-breed open source tools for Java. The two of them were joined in September 2007 by Olivier Gaudin, who was enthused by Sonar’s vision and started contributing to it.

In March 2008, these three individuals decided to combine their expertise and passion to found SonarSource and take Sonar to the enterprise market. SonarSource was founded in November 2008 and a year later, in October 2009, it released its first commercial plugin, Views, for projects portfolio management, with ground-breaking features like a project dashboard, hotspots, a time machine, and code drilldown. At the same time, Sonar was honored at the Open World Forum 2009 for being one of the most original projects in terms of innovation, quality of execution and potential for value creation.

By March 2010, SonarSource was beginning to see both community enterprise acceptance of Sonar, which was now being downloaded more than 2,000 times a month. In May 2010, SonarSource released COBOL and Visual Basic plugins for Sonar, followed a few months later by a SQALE plugin. The company had also grown in size and, thanks to the success of both Sonar and its commercial offerings, was able to raise the pace of research and development. The results were seen in the release of the C# plugin (June 2011) and the PL/SQL plugin (September 2011).

Today, SonarSource has more than 200 customers worldwide, including Cisco Systems, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Michelin, Telefonica, BNP Paribas, and many others. Sonar is used in more than 15,000 organizations and SonarSource provides consulting services and support for mission-critical Sonar deployments across the world.