Puppet Labs, a leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, today announced that VMware, Inc. has invested $30 million in the company. Coincident with the funding, the companies agreed to a strategic partnership for delivering IT management solutions that will enable customers to fully realize the agility and productivity benefits of virtualization and cloud in heterogeneous, multi-vendor IT environments. Through the funding and partnership, Puppet Labs will be able to accelerate the development of its award-winning products, increase market adoption in new geographies, and work jointly with VMware to deliver, market and sell solutions.

"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."

Virtualization and cloud computing promise enterprise IT organizations step-function improvements in agility and productivity. However, legacy IT systems management vendors have been unable to fully unlock this potential, as their solutions were conceived before DevOps and the cloud. In contrast, Puppet Labs' declarative, model-based approach provides IT operations the tools they need to manage at the rate and scale of the cloud. As a result, Puppet Labs is seeing accelerating market demand.

Industry analysts recognize the disruptive impact virtualization and cloud are having on the IT management sector as well, particularly regarding deployment cycle expectations. According to Gartner, "The desire to speed up the introduction of software updates into production is stimulating interest in tools that can automate the build, test and release life cycle," in the April 19th "Cool Vendors in DevOps, 2012" research, authored by Ronni Colville, et al.

Customers today are already finding benefit in the interoperability of the VMware and Puppet Labs products. For example, Puppet Enterprise, Puppet Labs' flagship commercial product, enables system administrators to automatically and dynamically provision, configure, and manage virtual machines, taking advantage of the VMware vSphere API. Customers use the integration of VMware vFabric™ Application Director™ 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™.

"Both Puppet Labs and VMware are key technology partners in implementing a DevOps approach to application delivery," said Mark Schena, Systems Automation Manager at Constant Contact, a leading provider of online marketing services to more than 500,000 small businesses. "We look forward to seeing the benefits of tighter product integration between them."

"VMware's leadership in virtualization and cloud computing is changing the landscape of IT," said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. "With this funding and strategic partnership, Puppet Labs and VMware will together enable IT customers to move faster, at greater scale, within diverse IT environments."

About Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs, Inc. is the leader in IT automation. Puppet Labs' software provides system administrators the operational agility, efficiency and insight they need to proactively manage dynamic infrastructure, scaling from tens of servers to thousands, physical or virtual, on-premise or in the cloud. Thousands of the world's leading organizations are using Puppet Labs' software to configure and manage their IT infrastructure, including Citrix, eBay, NYSE, Match.com, Oracle/Sun, Shopzilla, and Zynga. Now numbering more than 100 employees and based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs is backed by investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, VMware, Cisco, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and Emerson Street Partners. To learn more, please visit www.puppetlabs.com.