The Sonar project was launched more than 6 years ago, and SonarSource, the company that develops and promotes Sonar, was set up almost 5 years ago. Since then, we at SonarSource have consistently focused on developing the platform, really staying in our role of Software vendor. Except for cases where we could bring a unique expertise, we have avoided providing consulting services for several reasons:

• We want to focus all our energy on improving the platform, and consulting would be very disruptive.
• We want to avoid the “easy” money to stay focused on the core of the business: the software.

Those reasons are good enough for not going into the consulting business, but there is another one that dwarfs them all in my opinion: there is a huge market out there for companies that want to run a business around code quality. And when there is a big market, it generally does not take long before numerous companies respond to market demands with rich offerings. We could certainly compete in such a marketplace, but it’s not what we do best. Therefore it’s clear to us: we should focus on developing the tool, and consultancy companies will execute on implementation services. This was our vision 5 years ago, and it has not changed!

I am amazed every day to see how many companies are considering Sonar as the next tool they will adopt massively. Amongst them are the biggest companies in the world. As an example, we know that at least 30 of the Fortune 100 companies (and we’re sure there are more) are using Sonar intensively across their organizations. Those guys need professional services to succeed in their implementations: they obviously need support for installation and configuration of the tool, but what they need first and foremost is help defining strategies and implementing processes around code quality. For example, they need help to:

• Define quality requirements and map them into a Sonar quality gate
• Define and implement the reporting necessary to execute on the strategy
• Define actions plan for remediation of existing issues
• Define a process to enforce actions plan
• …

Companies need professional services to succeed with Sonar – services we cannot offer, but would like to support. To that end, we have developed a SonarSource partnership program that provides partner support for the pre-sales process, complete access to our entire solution, discounts on our Editions, and some visibility on our web site.

For those who aren’t ready to come on board with this partnership program yet, of course you’re still welcome to do business around Sonar and use the user mailing list to share experience and provide feedback. But we hope you’ll join us in this partnership, to the betterment of your ventures and the Sonar community at large.