Jason van Zyl is the Founder and CTO of Sonatype, the leader in Java development infrastructure whose customers include Intuit, eBay, Qualcomm and eTrade, and he has over 10 years of experience in open source and proprietary enterprise software development. Prior to Sonatype, Jason was the founder Periapt, Inc., a company that provided software infrastructure development services to Fortune 500 companies such as Toyota Corp., Bank of America, and Coca-Cola Co. Before Periapt, he worked as a Technology Architect at Compusense, a world leader in sensory analysis and data research.

An open source enthusiast, Jason is one of the founders of the Apache Maven project, and founder the Plexus IoC framework, and the Apache Velocity project. Jason currently serves as Chair of the Apache Maven Project Management Committee. He has been involved with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) for seven years, helped to found Codehaus, a well respected incubation facility for open source community projects, and is a frequent speaker at many major software conferences, including JavaOne, EclipseCon, EmergingTech, and ApacheCon.