Cisco pulls Puppet's purse strings
Invests along with Google and VMware in IP automation start-up's C round
By Jim Duffy on Wed, 11/30/11 - 4:48pm.Cisco has invested in Puppet Labs, a maker of IT automation software. Actually, Cisco was but one new investor in Puppet Labs' C round of financing, which totaled $8.5 million.
Other new investors in the company include Google Ventures and VMware. They join existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners in the round.
Puppet's software is targeted at IT systems administrators. It enables automated provisioning, configuring, and managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure for enterprises with on-premise or cloud-based applications. In September, Puppet rolled out Release 2.0 of its Puppet Enterprise software after expanding into the enterprise market from its open source roots and releasing its first commercial product in January.
The customer list is impressive, and totals 250 in all. It includes a Who's Who of bleeding edge IT shops, such as Zynga, Twitter, The New York Stock Exchange, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University. Puppet Labs has also grown its partner ecosystem to include integration with VMware, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, RightScale and Zenoss, among others.
It could be a strategic move for Cisco, and may portend an acquisition of the company - certainly, Puppet fits the Cisco acquisition profile: small, easily integrate able, a product jumping on a market transition, and a company perhaps culturally synched with Cisco. Cisco recently formed the Cloud and Systems Management Technology Group under CIO Rebecca Jacoby in an effort to boost its share of the IaaS, PaaS and other "aaS" markets. Puppet reads like it fits that group's mission.
And you can bet that most of those 250 Puppet customers have Cisco gear in their networks.
Puppet Labs and its MCollective software made our recent list of 5 cool tools for cloud management. We also recognized Puppet as one of the 11 open source companies to watch two years ago when at that time it was known as Reductive Labs.
The Series C round brings Puppet's total funding to just under $16 million since its founding in 2009. The company is based in Portland, OR.
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