ActiveState appoints Abby Kearns as CEO

ActiveState appointed Abby Kearns as chief executive officer and said Stephen Baker moved from the CEO role to its board, a leadership change intended to support scaling as enterprise demand for managed open source increased.

The company said 96% of enterprise applications included Operations Support System (OSS), which it said made OSS critical infrastructure for software development, and that most companies did not manage it as critical infrastructure; the company said unmanaged open source was the dominant source of exploitable vulnerabilities, legal exposure, and software supply chain compromise.

The company provided a catalog of more than 79 million secure open source components and container images and said those could be consumed via artifact repository, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), Immutable Deployment Environment (IDE), or directly from ActiveState.

It said it continuously monitored and updated open source components to help keep companies vulnerability free and reported that companies using ActiveState saw a 60-99% reduction in CVEs and saved as much as 30% of developer time. Under its new leadership, the company said it would continue its mission to help enterprises tame the complexity of open source software (OSS).

“ActiveState has spent decades building the world's most trusted library of built-from-source components. As enterprises grapple with the security risks of unmanaged open source software - a challenge amplified by the surge in AI-accelerated development - our role as a 'one-stop shop' for this foundational infrastructure has never been more critical,” said Kearns.

The company said the leadership transition represented a next step as it planned to scale to meet global demand for securing customers' open source in mission-critical applications.