Summary: A short Puppet interview delivered upon the news about a multi-million-dollar investment

Puppet is a Free/open source software tool which is used by many companies. I rely on it heavily at work. As we recently covered the release of a Puppet book we decided to also celebrate the news about Puppet Labs getting more funding. We spoke to Luke about the news and here are his answers.

1. Congratulations on the news, Luke. How long was this under negotiation and who was the initiator?

Luke: The investment was negotiated quite quickly. We had multiple outside investors who were interested in initiating a round, but our existing investors were excited enough about Puppet Labs that they proposed a deal we were happy with before we had talked to more than a couple outside investors.

2. At what capacity does Google use Puppet in-house to the best of your knowledge?

Luke: Google has published that they use Puppet on thousands of hosts in their corporate IT, but they don't publish specific numbers. Their installation is rare in that it primarily uses Puppet to manage workstations and laptops, as opposed to servers.

3. What will the news mean to existing users of Puppet?

Luke: It means we've got the resources to continue focusing on improving our product while we grow our sales and marketing teams, to enable us to bring Puppet to a wider group of users.

"Cisco has not yet gone public as a user of Puppet," explained to us the PR agent of Puppet Labs, "so we cannot explicitly state that Cisco uses Puppet, but I can give you a bit of background on Puppet and Cisco: Cisco is a great fit for Puppet because the demographic is a nearly-perfect overlap consisting of network admins and sysadmins, and Cisco has a lot of management issues that Puppet can help solve. Cisco is moving into virtualization and knows the Puppet infrastructure very well."

Here is the press release (November 29th, 2011).

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Puppet Labs Raises $8.5M in Series C Funding

Cisco, Google Ventures, and VMware Join Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, and Radar Partners To Build On Market Success and Accelerate Growth

PORTLAND, OR - NOVEMBER 29, 2011 - Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, today announced the closing of $8.5 million in Series C financing to further accelerate the company’s already strong growth and customer success. New investors Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware join existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners. With the $8.5 million investment, Puppet Labs has now raised a total of $15.75 million.

The funding caps off a pivotal year for the company, which now boasts more than 250 customers including Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University. In January, Puppet Labs expanded beyond its open source roots and announced Puppet Enterprise, the first commercial version of Puppet™, the powerful yet easy-to-use IT automation solution for system administrators. In March, the company was chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the “OnDemand Top 100” winners.

In September, Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 2.0 at its annual user conference, PuppetConf. Puppet Enterprise 2.0, the primary driver of business growth, has opened new markets for Puppet Labs in making the provisioning, configuring, and managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure dramatically easier for system administrators.

In October, The Wall Street Journal noted that the demand for IT professionals with “Puppet skills” had tripled over the previous 12 months. This year has also seen Puppet Labs’ community grow beyond North America and Europe, with user groups and meet-ups sprouting worldwide, including in China, India, and Japan. Puppet Labs has also continued to grow its partner ecosystem such that it now offers integrations with VMware, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, RightScale, Zenoss, to name a few.

“The participation of these new investors in this latest round reinforces our lead in providing powerful IT automation tools for system administrators, whether deploying applications on-premise or in the cloud,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. “Together, we are well-positioned to enable IT organizations to fully capitalize on the tectonic shifts of virtualization and cloud computing in their delivery of business results.”

About Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs, Inc. was founded in 2005 and shipped the first release of the open source Puppet Project later the same year. The popularity of Puppet Labs’ IT automation solution has since grown to where it is now responsible for managing millions of nodes across thousands of organizations, both on-premise and in the cloud, including Zynga, Citrix, Shopzilla, Match.com, Oracle/Sun, to name a few. Now numbering sixty employees and based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs is backed by Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Radar Partners, True Ventures, and VMware.