Today, we are pleased to share that Pactflow has entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by SmartBear, a leading provider of software development and quality tools.
Pactflow was founded in 2019 with a vision to create a world that doesn’t worry about software developments. The opportunity to create a commercial product that leveraged the open source software (OSS) contract testing framework, Pact arose while my Co-Founders Beth Skurrie, Ron Holshausen and I were employed by Australian technology consultancy, DiUS, supporting companies of all sizes to transition to cloud-native application development and to accelerate their digital initiatives. Triggered by the growing complexity of testing microservices and API integrations and the demand for an enterprise-grade solution to support Pact at scale, the team hasn’t looked back since! In just a few short years, Pactflow has grown, supporting over 7,500 customers across the world.
What this means for Pactflow
Now more than ever, companies of all sizes are moving with unprecedented speed to digitally transform. According to the most recent State of Software Quality API report, 61% of survey respondents chose microservices as the technology that will most likely drive API growth.
By joining the SmartBear, we will continue to help solve the complex challenges of testing microservices and API integrations that companies are facing as they accelerate cloud-native application development and digital initiatives.  It also a means an investment in the growth of contract testing, the OSS Pact community and Pactflow. We look forward to the benefits associated with the scale of SmartBear’s business including efficiencies, expertise, and experiences.
Why SmartBear?
SmartBear focuses on one priority, that never change – it’s quality. For Pactflow, quality means being able to confidently provide your end customers with the most delightful and seamless experience possible, without the stress of breakages, outages or hold ups. Beyond an alignment of product philosophies, including customer-first design and a hybrid product-led growth and enterprise sales go-to-market approach, we are both equally committed to the open source community, contributors and fostering growth of such solutions.
What this means for OSS Pact framework
Pact, authored in 2013 by a group of developers and was designed to develop and test integration points using consumer driven contracts. Starting as a solution for the challenges of integration testing a fast growing web of Ruby microservices, Pact is now a thriving OSS with implementations in 10+ languages and a global, thriving, and active community of more than 3,500 members that boasts a user group of 10's of thousands of engineers.
Pactflow and the team, including Ron, Beth, and Matt will now be part of a much larger, organisation, backed by global reach and investment so they can continue to grow and evolve. SmartBear will become the sponsor and custodian of Pact. With its strong tradition of supporting open source software, SmartBear is committing to invest, grow, and ensure that the Pact community can continue to organically and transparently drive the open source project. SmartBear will work alongside industry leaders and the community to ensure a governance model that evolves Pact in a vendor-neutral and collaborative manner
What this means for Pactflow customers
As a part of SmartBear, we will continue our journey of helping solve the complex challenges of testing microservices and API integrations that companies are facing as they accelerate cloud-native application development and digital initiatives.
From a practice perspective, you will still get same love from Pactflow—but with additional supporters and resources behind us from our new parent company. In the coming months we will be integrating more closely with the ‘siblings’ in our new family—for example SwaggerHub and more—so keep an eye out for these perks! We will keep you updated as things progress.
Onwards and upwards
As I blogged about 12 months ago, Beth, Ron, the team and I are 100% committed to our vision of helping the world worry less about deployments. We will continue to do this as key supporters of the OSS Pact community as well as advance Pactflow as a team and enterprise friendly offering that customers love within the SmartBear family.
Read our commitment to OSS.
About SmartBear
SmartBear’s tools are built to streamline DevOps and testing processes while seamlessly working with the products such as TestComplete, Swagger, Cucumber, ReadyAPI, Zephyr, Bugsnag. SmartBear’s family of tools—spanning test automation, API design, collaboration, performance testing, test management, and more—are used by 16 million developers, testers, and operations engineers at over 32,000 organizations globally.
