VMware Invests $30 Million in Puppet Labs

IT automation software Puppet Labs has received a $30 million investment from VMware, the company said this week. The funding is part of a broader strategic partnership in which the two companies will be working together to integrate better.

It makes sense for VMware to invest, as Puppet Labs is a compatible management tool used by much of VMware’s user base.  Puppet Labs will be using the funding to accelerate product development, increase market adoption in new geographies, and work jointly with VMware to market and sell its solutions. VMware continues to make moves in the Software-Defined data center world, and Puppet Labs is one example of the rise of DevOps – tight collaboration and integration between software developers and IT professionals, a relatively new approach to doing things.

“Puppet Labs is at the forefront of IT automation, and is a catalyst in the DevOps movement – accelerating service delivery and business agility” said Ramin Sayar, Vice President and General Manager, Virtualization & Cloud Management, VMware. “This strategic investment and partnership will further accelerate the software-defined data center, and will allow a more extensive automation and orchestration solution across infrastructure and application elements for VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructures, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services.”

Puppet Labs has raised money in the past, most recently an $8.5 million series C at the tail end of 2011.  Total funding in the company is now $45.5 million.

There’s already a lot of interoperability of the VMware and Puppet Labs products.  Puppet Enterprise, Puppet Labs’ flagship commercial product, enables system administrators to automatically and dynamically provision and manage virtual machines, taking advantage of the VMware vSphere API. Customers use the integration of VMware vFabric Application Director integration with Puppet Enterprise for dynamically provisioning private cloud services, leveraging the more than 750 ready-to-run application configuration modules available on Puppet Forge, Puppet Labs’ online content marketplace.  As part of the strategic partnership, going forward VMware and Puppet Labs will collaborate on additional product integrations, including VMware vCloud Automation Center™, VMware vCenter Operations Manager, and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager.