Puppet Labs gets $30M investment from VMware

VMware has invested $30 million in Puppet Labs, makers of the open source configuration and management framework Puppet and its commercial version Puppet Enterprise. This gives VMware the lion's share of venture capital (VC) investment in the company which, in total, has $46 million of VC money backing it. The move comes six weeks after VMware's parent, EMC, announced a reorganisation and the creation of the Pivotal Initiative which will take on VMware's non-virtualisation middleware, mostly open source, products.

In a blog post, Puppet CEO Luke Kanies, said the investment was part of a commercial agreement to jointly market Puppet products. The announcement emphasises that Puppet is not going to move to being VMware-centric as its strength is in its ability to work in multi-vendor IT environments.

That said, Ramin Sayer, VP and General Manager of VMware Virtualisation and Cloud Management, said that the partnership would 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." VMware and Puppet are planning to add to Puppet's 750 application configuration modules with new integration code to work with VMware's vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Operations Manager and vCenter Configuration Manager.

(djwm)