Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It may not be as trendy as “big data,” but IT automation software is still big business, and startups in this sector are pulling in massive funding rounds.

Virtualization giant VMware has invested $30 million into Puppet Labs, a Portland, Ore.-based provider of software for system administrators. As part of the funding, the companies formed a strategic partnership to deliver a more robust set of IT tools to customers.

Puppet Labs hopes to accelerate market adoption and secure high-profile customers in new geographies.

Ramin Sayar, the vice president of the virtualization and cloud management team at VMware, said in a statement that this will allow for “more extensive automation and orchestration solutions across infrastructure and application elements” for VMware-based private and public clouds, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Sayar revealed that a major focus for the partnership will be software-defined datacenters. He framed it as a win-win situation for both companies.

Puppet Labs has already integrated its flagship product, Puppet Enterprise, with VMware. Puppet Enterprise lets automatically manage virtual machines, and take advantage of VMware’s vSphere API. Going forward, the companies plan to collaborate on new products. 

Marionette image via eugene // Flickr