Open source management applications continue to flourish in the face of a difficult economy. And as many products mature to support enterprise environments, venture capital investors are recognizing the market opportunity for flexible, low-cost IT automation software.

9 management applications that won’t bust your budget 

Reductive Labs this week announced it had secured $2 million in Series A funding led by True Ventures and other private investors. The Portland, Ore., company will put the venture capital funding to further expand and enhance its flagship offering, Puppet. The company, which lists Google, Digg, Twitter and the New York Stock Exchange among Puppet users, says the software is able to “manage IT infrastructure as code” – even large scale, transaction-driven businesses, such as those that embrace virtualization and cloud computing. 

The software is said to centralize and unify systems administration tasks, such as configuration management. According to Reductive Labs, the software uses a “declarative-based language for expressing system configuration” that enables IT managers to encode semantics about why systems are configured as they are. This capability augments helps IT managers apply best practices and processes to the environment. And Puppet creates an audit trail that shows what systems are running, the history of actions applied to the systems and the policies Puppet completed.

“Reductive Labs has brought to the market a truly disruptive solution, as evidenced by its adoption within the open source community and from some of the market’s leading edge companies,” said Phil Black, co-founder of True Ventures, in a statement.

Puppet is available under the GNU General Public License.

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Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.