VMware Puppet Labs Partnership Is Software Play

VMware Inc. has entered a strategic partnership and investment with Puppet Labs Inc., an IT software automation company touted to be “at the forefront of redefining orchestration and automation for the cloud era,” a key component of the VMware’s future growth plans.

But VMware is no stranger to Puppet Labs: This $30 million investment marks VMware’s second round of funding into the company, flanked by investors like Cisco Systems Inc. and Google Ventures.

This time around, VMware is getting more intimate, entering into a commercial agreement to ” jointly deliver, market and sell great products built for our mutual customers,” in addition to expanding Puppet Labs’ market reach. VMware’s cache with Puppet Labs will help both companies more quickly develop tools and software strategies that can turn the software-defined data center into a more “tangible” item. While the concept may be abstract today, VMware’s dedication to accelerating its growth is interesting, especially amid sentiments from Red Hat Inc., which suggested a software-defined data center was a future reality some years out. It’s clear VMware is looking for an edge in this space, and considering its virtualization roots, it’s not surprising.

At VMware’s executive blog, Ramin Sayar, vice president of cloud infrastructure and management at VMware, said Puppet Labs was a critical part of VMware’s efforts to reshape how software-defined data centers are managed. Sayar writes, “A new approach to management has been a critical tenet of VMware’s product strategy over the last several years as we have developed solutions to help customers simplify and automate the management of the complete set of infrastructure services.”

For VMware, Puppet Labs can provide a more automated and programmable interface that spans multiple hypervisor environments and can interoperate with existing cloud resources. Puppet Labs’ technology can manage VMware private, public, hybrid and physical cloud infrastructure, including clouds built on OpenStack and Amazon Web Services. With so much of VMware’s capabilities built on the platform-agnostic, x86-friendly environment, Puppet Labs is a tight fit that will “define” the next-gen data center and accelerate the VMware’s vision for an easily accessible and configurable IT-as-a-service world.