IT Automation Provider Puppet Labs Acquires Cloudsmith

IT automation software provider Puppet Labs has acquired Cloudsmith, a provider of development tools for rapidly building and testing infrastructure automation. The acquisition will integrate the Cloudsmith engineering team and products into Puppet in a bid to accelerate enterprise adoption of IT automation. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloudsmith provides tools for system administrators and developers that make it easier to automate management of IT resources through intuitive GUIs and SaaS applications. Puppet Labs plans to tightly integrate Cloudsmith's products with its flagship Puppet Enterprise offering to boost customers' ability to automate and manage complex infrastructures.

"The Cloudsmith team is stacked with an exceptional group of technologists who are influential and heavily involved in both the Puppet and Eclipse communities," said Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs. "Like Puppet Labs, Cloudsmith cares about its products’ ease of use and has tremendous expertise in building great tools. We look forward to leveraging Cloudsmith’s experience and technology in our product suite to make automation accessible to an even larger segment of enterprise IT professionals.”

Two notable Cloudsmith offerings are Geppetto and Stack Hammer, both of which will continue to be developed and supported post-acquisition.  Geppetto is an integrated development environment (IDE) for building and publishing Puppet modules. Stack Hammer is a service for integrating, testing, and deploying collections of Puppet modules as complete “stacks” through integrations with GitHub and Amazon EC2.

"We have been working with the Puppet Labs team and community for years and find we have a shared vision, culture, and passion around helping IT teams improve their lives through automation," said Mitch Sonies, CEO and founder of Cloudsmith.  "And while the Cloudsmith Geppetto community has grown to more than 10,000 users in a short period of time, together with Puppet Labs we’re looking forward to bringing Geppetto’s ease-of-automation benefits to many, many more."

According to technology research firm Gartner, automation is one of the top initiatives for enterprise IT in 2013.   Puppet Labs’ mission is making it easier to manage the flow of changes in complex IT environments.