Reductive Labs, creator of the popular open-source IT automation project Puppet, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from True Ventures, the firm that also invested in (then) open-source marketing automation vendor Loopfuse.
Reductive plans to use the funding, which was announced Tuesday, to build out the functionality of Puppet, a move that won't win it any friends among competitors like Hewlett-Packard's OpsWare.
It's a good time for the company to be raising money. Counting such heavyweights as Google, Digg, Twitter, the New York Stock Exchange, Barclays Capital, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Harvard Law School, and Stanford University, among others, as Puppet users, this Series A funding puts Reductive Labs in a prime position to add polish to the already powerful Puppet IT automation framework.
I caught up with Luke Kanies, Reductive Labs' founder, to ask him about the funding.
Luke Kanies,
Reductive founder
Q: You've eschewed raising money before now so...why now? What does cash give you that you couldn't (or wouldn't) do before?
Kanies: The last six to nine months has seen two significant changes for us: large company after large company is revealed to be a Puppet user (e.g., eBay, Oracle, NYSE, and large government agencies) and our current sales team isn't built to operate on their time frames or that widely. We also have spent almost nothing on marketing, and increasing funding there will help those companies already using Puppet to see how we can help, while helping those on the fence see the value of our solution.
Also, we've found that our primary constraint today is execution, rather than research or adoption--we have major development areas almost entirely planned and ready to execute, wanting only the funding for the development itself.
Chef claims to be a an upgrade over vanilla Puppet. Is the fundraising in part a response to Chef? How does this help you to compete against and beat the Chefs of the world?
Kanies: The fundraising is in response to our community's and customers' needs, not potential competitors. Chef is a somewhat similar open-source project but you can't buy support, training, or consulting for it, you can't get custom development done on it, and it's only been around for six months. We're obviously staying conscious of its potential to compete, but it's not on the radar for any of our customers today.
That being said, the funding helps us stay ahead of the curve; while Chef has to focus on maturity and becoming suitable for wider audiences, we can continue to play on Puppet's strengths there while we add the next level of functionality for our customers and community.
How is the business doing? Any statistics you can provide around Puppet adoption?
Kanies: In terms of public users, Red Hat, Sun, Stanford, Google, the Guardian newspaper, Shopzilla, Digg, Twitter, and Barclays Capital are just a few of the worldwide leaders using Puppet.
Our stats are relatively minimal, because we just haven't been able to fund much in that aspect of our marketing. But we've got more than 1,200 people on our users list, revenue is growing 300 to 400 percent this year--in a horrible recession--and our Web traffic is growing 400 percent a year.
HP bought OpsWare in 2007 for $1.6 billion, yet the OpsWare software is arguably less elegant and powerful than Puppet. Should HP/OpsWare be nervous?
Kanies: Yes. Our solution has already been chosen over both BladeLogic and OpsWare at multiple companies. People have picked a Reductive Labs solution for less than one-tenth the cost of a less functional solution from one of the big boys that takes longer to install and has a higher upkeep cost.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Cisco has been on a software acquisition spree this past year, acquiring Jabber, PostPath, and now Tidal Software, among others. But as Cisco goes after the data center with its new Unified Computing push, one open-source company should be on Cisco's radar screen: Reductive Labs, creators of the Puppet project, a framework for automating system administration.
(Credit:
Reductive Labs)
Tidal is a performance-monitoring solution for data centers. It's a nice start, and a definite upgrade over Cisco's baseline Unified Computing management tools. But as Forrester senior analyst Glenn O'Donnell suggests, "Cisco is the new kid in town in the data center and will need a solid software strategy to go against HP and IBM."
In other words, Cisco needs a more holistic data-center management strategy, and Puppet could play a key role. Puppet gives Cisco the ability to semantically encode "why" instead of just "what" or "how" into data center solutions, making data center deployments more manageable over time:
I was only seeing the static state of the working system. What if you want to change things? If you have working images, you have to reconstruct "What" by discovery, good luck with "Why." If you are lucky, it was you that set up the systems and it wasn't over six months ago. The "What" and "Why" were apparent to someone, potentially you, when the systems were first set up, but now you just have this bucket of bootable bits that ostensibly does something. If it isn't working, or there is a need to change something significant, the choice is poking around the bucket of bits until the new "What" is in place or starting over with a new "Why" that is lost as soon as the new image is finished.
If Puppet is building your services, "What" and "Why" can be recorded, clarified, recovered, and manipulated. Version control becomes straight forward, manageable, and transparent. Services can have clear definitions and relationships. So obvious...can't believe it took me this long to "get it"...
In other words, describing services in Puppet provides both the ability to configure machines but also the ability to ensure they are configured properly over time. An enterprise data center isn't static. Understanding and configuring its dynamics is what makes Puppet so interesting, and what should make it intriguing to Cisco.
Even virtualization doesn't make this any easier. If anything, it compounds the problem of management. Puppet, however, can facilitate management of virtual servers.
Cisco is entering an established market with strong incumbents like IBM and HP. To win, it needs to innovate in its data center strategy. Puppet, used by Stanford, Google, Sony, and other leading-edge companies, could offer it a way to disrupt the incumbents with an innovative approach to IT management: a way to manage data-center resources over time, and not merely at deployment.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
What with all the virtualization hype, one would think that virtual servers had the option of parting the Red Sea or walking on it.
While there's a great deal of promise in virtualization, there's also the peril of managing virtual servers, as Luke Kanies, founder of the Puppet project, points out in a blog post.
You have significant problems when you rely on golden images (i.e., virtual images complete with all necessary services): image sprawl, updating your images, and image state vs. running state...Maintaining these (virtual) images is more like managing a foil ball: it's difficult to pull apart, difficult to press back together, and if you get too many of them, they just get into the way.
It's perhaps not surprising that Kanies sees Puppet as the answer to this image sprawl and confusion:
If, instead, you use a single, base image for all of your work--I call these images stem cell images for what are hopefully obvious reasons--and then use a tool like Puppet to configure them, once they're running, you avoid all of the above problems: you have one image to maintain, and it's necessarily simplistic, you use the same tool and the same configuration base across all images, and Puppet keeps your machines updated within 30 minutes of any central change.
His point is good. In moving from physical machines to virtual machines, we've tended to gloss over the complexity that this introduces, preferring to focus on all the efficiency gains virtualization promises.
In other words, the sexier that virtualization becomes, the more important (and, dare I say sexy?) systems management becomes. Suddenly, Hyperic, Reductive Labs (the company behind Puppet), RiverMuse, Zenoss, GroundWork, and other IT management companies take center stage as virtualization, and the cloud-based computing trend it enables, become de facto IT strategies.
As this new competition emerges, however, the IT management companies that know the cloud best will do best. So far, crowns probably go to Reductive Labs and Hyperic, as both have aggressively targeted cloud-based computing. Over time, however, this may change.
Regardless of the eventual winner, it's good to see IT management gaining some sex appeal.
Just when I think we've tapped out all possible open-source business opportunities, I hear of another open-source start-up. Or several.
This past week I've heard of a few new ones, or of others that have been around for a while but have yet to take venture money. Reductive Labs (puppet project), Cilk Arts, RiverMuse, and Watircraft are a few that I can mention publicly, but there are several more that are still in stealth. In two cases, a business hasn't been formed but some very interesting ideas are being kicked around.
Open-source venture investing may be down this past quarter, but the ideas around commercializing open source continue to bubble up.
It's not a great time to be launching a new venture, unless you've got an idea that is long on product, short on sales and marketing costs, and inexpensive to manage. You know, an open-source venture.
Not that money needs to be involved. Sourceforge currently holds over 180,000 open-source projects, up from 168,470 projects in February 2008, and Microsoft's CodePlex, Google Code, and other repositories hold tens of thousands more projects, each also gaining new open-source projects this year.
In fact, traffic to each of these open-source project sites is up considerably in the past year:
Open-source Project Site Visitors
(Credit: Compete.com)No, it's not a great economy, but yes, open source stands to benefit. The traffic is increasing to open-source sites. Will the money?
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