Devops fan favorite Puppet Labs is getting an additional $ 30 million in backing from VMware and the two companies will team up to provide new IT management solutions for use in VMware shops. That means VMware now provides the lion’s share of Puppet’s total of about $ 45 million in VC funding
Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies
This move comes just a month after VMware spun out the bulk of its developer-focused non-virtualization technology to the Pivotal Initiative with parent company EMC. Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies said that reorg, which happened since the funding deal was finalized, represents “a nice refocusing of VMware around our core customer which is the system admin.”
In an interview, Kanies also said this does not mean that Puppet will retrench to VMware-only virtualization “One thing Puppet is strong at is heterogeneity — we support Red Hat or Windows, physical or virtual servers, public or private cloud,” he told me in an interview. Most enterprises already run VMware in some form, so this could be a good opportunity for Puppet.
VMware also participated in Puppet Labs (see disclosure below) $ 8.5 million Series C round, in November 2011, joining Cisco Systems and Google Ventures. Systems administrators often use Puppet’s open-source software Puppet software to configure and manage physical — and increasingly virtual — servers and other IT gear.
Portland, Ore.-based Puppet competes with Opscode and CFEngine to provide tools that automate the provisioning and change management for increasingly scaled-out cloud computing environments. Such tools are key to the growing DevOps movement in which software developers and operations people work together to make sure software projects meet business goals. In the past, developers and operations people within the same company often worked at cross purposes.
Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
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