Smile and SensioLabs: the alliance of two market leaders in Open-Source

Smile, the European market leader in digital Open-Source, and SensioLabs have announced their alliance.

Sharing a common vision of Open-Source, Smile and SensioLabs are seeking to accelerate their respective development plans while offering their clients the benefits of synergy and a wider spectrum of support services.

SensioLabs is welcoming Smile as a majority shareholder in the company. Smile and SensioLabs share the same values and ambitions, which they have already demonstrated by jointly contributing to the founding of the Open Source School and organising the Paris Open Source Summit.

In addition to its extensive in-house talent, SensioLabs collaborates with a network of over 55 specialist partners for the Symfony framework and PHP, located in more than 20 countries. Over the years, SensioLabs has developed unrivalled consultancy and training expertise to support the most ambitious of companies and projects, based on the PHP/Symfony Open-Source technologies.

SensioLabs is also an incubator of tools and solutions to improve the day-to-day challenges faced by web developers. Proud creator of Symfony in 2005 and Blackfire in 2015, SensioLabs relies on 20 years of experience in digital and 13 years in Open-Source. The company aims to push forward the technological boundaries of PHP while generating the web innovations of the future.

Symfony, a PHP Open-Source framework already downloaded more than 2 billion times, will also benefit from the alliance, yet without impacting its governance or independence. Dozens of major PHP projects are based on Symfony. Its global community consists of thousands of developers, including Smile, which is expanding its involvement through SensioLabs.

Fabien Potencier, co-founder of SensioLabs, is delighted with this alliance: “SensioLabs has grown very rapidly thanks to the talent of its team and its powerful ecosystem. Now we need to break new ground by joining forces with a major operator that shares our values and recognises our expertise. A strong entrepreneurial and Open-Source culture is an integral part of Smile’s DNA, which will help us to accelerate our development with great flexibility.“

Marc Palazon, Chairman of Smile, explains: “We take great pride in being able to support the ongoing success of SensioLabs. It is a company we already know very well, a real gem of a French company with unique expertise which has enjoyed strong growth year after year. We are also delighted to be able to enhance our contribution to the Symfony framework. It is an exceptional Open-Source project which has become a mainstay within the Open-Source community and for major digital projects.“

Through this new strategic alliance, Smile and SensioLabs will be accelerating and supplementing their respective growth. As a unifying force within the Open-Source ecosystem for the benefit of its clients, Smile will be offering SensioLabs its project know-how and will enhance its range of expertise in PHP and Symfony.

Fabien Potencier and Grégory Pascal, co-founders of SensioLabs, will remain at the helm of the company. Smile intends to facilitate the growth of SensioLabs and enable it to expand internationally.