Can Apache Maven Make It by Going Commercial? - Page 2

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For instance, Nexus Pro will gain integration with LDAP that will provide enterprise access rights and roles to Maven usage, he said. Staging and production segmentation for Maven repositories will also be included through Nexus Pro.

"We will release a version of Nexus Pro in the coming month, and that has commercial features," De Visser said. "We'll sell that for about $3,000 per server per year, so there is the business model."

Nexus Pro is just the first step in Maven commercialization for Sonatype. By the spring of 2009, De Visser noted that Sonatype will have a Nexus Enterprise version that will introduce federation into the its capabilities. Federation ensures that whenever a check in is made to one local repository, it's mirrored to the rest of the global team.

With the enhancement, enterprises could scale out their Maven repository deployments -- an improvement that takes into account the fact that many enterprise use globally distributed development teams.

Maven support and training is another area where Sonatype is looking to build its business.

"We are actually rolling out a support and training offer for Maven itself, and by the time we go commercial in another four weeks, we will have Maven support, training and Nexus Pro -- that's our portfolio," De Visser said.

To market and sell those products, De Visser is betting on the network effect to negate the need to build a large direct sales force. That approach is based on his view that open source should always have a low barrier to entry, making it easy for users to migrate to the commercially supported version when they need to.

He also argued that other open source startups think it's necessary to build up a direct sales force in part because they inherited that belief from traditional commercial firms.

"We don't have to build an external sales force with people driving BMWs," De Visser said. "We can stay much closer to a simple transactional model and we will probably invest little in marketing."