Yvonne Wassenaar (Puppet)
Infrastructure automation software company Puppet has been acquired by Perforce for an undisclosed amount. Perforce is responsible for a suite of popular developer and devops tools, most notably Helix.
Puppet's 500 employees, brand, and software suite will continue to work as a standalone business unit within Perforce for now.
Founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2005, Puppet rose to fame in the early days of infrastructure as code, alongside the likes of Chef, Ansible, and Salt. It has since pivoted into broader infrastructure automation and compliance tools.
This acquisition means that all four of those companies have been acquired in the past eight years, after Red Hat purchased Ansible in 2015, VMware acquired SaltStack in 2020, and Chef was purchased by Progress for $220 million in 2020.
The most popular infrastructure orchestration tools today tend to reside with the cloud vendors themselves, such as Amazon Web Services CloudFormation, Google Cloud Deployment Manager, or Microsoft Azure Resource Manager, while the open source Hashicorp Terraform is also a highly popular option for automating infrastructure deployment.
"Similar to Puppet, Perforce has an incredible customer base and is a trusted devops leader delivering digital creation and planning, developer productivity tools, and automated testing and quality. The missing link? Puppet’s sweet spot: infrastructure as code," Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO of Puppet, wrote in a blog post.
"DevOps wouldn’t be where it is today without Puppet. But what matters long-term is not what financial milestones fuel a company’s growth.
"What matters long-term is that we continue to empower our customers to be leaders in their markets and that we provide our team members with some of the best years of their careers. This is what we have the potential to do with Perforce in a way that we could not have done on our own."
The deal is expected to close in May.
