We interviewed Manish Gupta, CMO at SonarSource, a leading provider of clean code solutions. We looked at the company’s story, the benefits of using clean code when
building websites, and what’s in the future of coders with the recent developments in AI technology.
Please present SonarSource to our audience. What solutions do you offer?
Sonar is helping organizations achieve a state of Clean Code where all new code and all changed code is clean, it is fit for development, and fit for production. Sonar provides products (SonarQube, SonarCloud, and SonarLint) and a methodology (Clean as You Code) for organizations to follow so they can achieve this ideal state. The Sonar approach appeals to developers, development teams, and development departments during the development phase and is also valuable to operations teams and security teams throughout the production life of the software. Our open source and commercial Sonar solution supports over 30 programming languages, frameworks and infrastructure technologies. It fits into the existing DevOps workflow and makes it better.
What is your story and mission?
Sonar’s mission is to equip organizations to achieve a state of Clean Code. In 2008, Olivier Gaudin co-founded SonarSource and has since grown the company that serves 400,000 organizations and seven million users worldwide. This includes 21,000 enterprise customers including over 75% of Fortune 100 and nearly half of Fortune 500 companies.
In April 2022, SonarSource raised $412 million in funding from new and existing investors, bringing our valuation to $4.7 billion. SonarSource is transforming the way organizations build software and enables them to make source code an asset rather than a liability. Our vision has also been validated by global customer adoption, an outstanding reputation within the developer community, and the software ecosystem’s recognition of the importance of Clean Code from start to finish.
Can you explain the importance of clean code?
Sonar is solving one of the most critical challenges facing the digital economy – bad code. Poor quality software results in $2.4 trillion in the US alone. This impacts ALL industries, ALL types of organizations – small, medium, and large – private and public sector; across ALL geographies.
Clean code represents a codebase that is fit for purpose, fit for production and fit for development. Clean Code creates tremendous business value at all levels of the organization by making code as an asset instead of a liability. Organizations achieve more, reduce risks, and increase the value of their software with clean code.
Can you share any success stories where your solutions had a significant impact on a project/company?
Sonar’s self-managed solution,
SonarQube has proven to be of immense value to organizations globally, including the worldwide industrial automation and digitalization branch of the Siemens group.
SonarQube made a significant impact for Siemens Digital Factory because it made sure their code base was of high quality, including being more secure across business units and development teams. Prior to using SonarQube they used a variety of different tools for code analysis that produced different metrics, which made it difficult for managers to obtain a holistic view of code quality. Multiple tools also increased the learning curve for managers, requiring them to learn the details of each tool before becoming productive with them. Finally, each tool produced its own reports, resulting in multiple points of entry to any discussion of code quality.
Thanks to SonarQube, Siemens Digital Factory was able to develop a unified project configuration methodology for projects using special programming languages and custom build environments to analyze and deliver code of the same caliber and operate more productively across the organization. With the use of SonarQube’s Quality Gates and developer guidance, their team was empowered to find and fix where there was an error and was provided guidance on how to solve it, overall enhancing their code quality.
Lastly, any exciting news or developments that you would like to share about SonarSource?
On February 7, 2023, we announced SonarQube 9.9 Long-Term-Support (LTS) with many key innovations to empower developers and organizations to achieve a state of Clean Code, quickly, securely, and at scale. This product launch (that typically happens every 18 months) focused on key features related to accelerated pull request analysis, support for building and deploying secure cloud-native applications, sophisticated enterprise-grade capabilities, and many innovations related to the detection engine and contextual education. Through the many capabilities for our users and customers, the main mission was to continue to deliver new business value so that everyone can implement clean coding practices and keep their software a long-term asset.
