PORTLAND, OR, Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, today announced the closing of $8.5 million in Series C financing to further accelerate the company's already strong growth and customer success. New investors Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware join existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners. With the $8.5 million investment, Puppet Labs has now raised a total of $15.75 million.

The funding caps off a pivotal year for the company, which now boasts more than 250 customers including Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University. In January, Puppet Labs expanded beyond its open source roots and announced Puppet Enterprise, the first commercial version of Puppet(TM), the powerful yet easy-to-use IT automation solution for system administrators. In March, the company was chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the "OnDemand Top 100″ winners.

In September, Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 2.0 at its annual user conference, PuppetConf. Puppet Enterprise 2.0, the primary driver of business growth, has opened new markets for Puppet Labs in making the provisioning, configuring, and managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure dramatically easier for system administrators.

In October, The Wall Street Journal noted that the demand for IT professionals with "Puppet skills" had tripled over the previous 12 months. This year has also seen Puppet Labs' community grow beyond North America and Europe, with user groups and meet-ups sprouting worldwide, including in China, India, and Japan. Puppet Labs has also continued to grow its partner ecosystem such that it now offers integrations with VMware, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, RightScale, Zenoss, to name a few.

"The participation of these new investors in this latest round reinforces our lead in providing powerful IT automation tools for system administrators, whether deploying applications on-premise or in the cloud," said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. "Together, we are well-positioned to enable IT organizations to fully capitalize on the tectonic shifts of virtualization and cloud computing in their delivery of business results."

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"Global companies need efficient solutions to manage their on-premise and cloud infrastructures," said Karim Faris, partner at Google Ventures. "The Puppet Labs team has demonstrated the market traction and leadership to capitalize on this tremendous opportunity, and we're looking forward to working with them to grow the business."

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About Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs, Inc. was founded in 2005 and shipped the first release of the open source Puppet Project later the same year. The popularity of Puppet Labs' IT automation solution has since grown to where it is now responsible for managing millions of nodes across thousands of organizations, both on-premise and in the cloud, including Zynga, Citrix, Shopzilla, Match.com, Oracle/Sun, to name a few. Now numbering sixty employees and based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs is backed by Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Radar Partners, True Ventures, and VMware.