VMware investing $30M with IT automation specialists Puppet Labs

VMware is investing $30 million with Puppet Labs, a provider of IT automation software for scaling servers and infrastructure both on-premises and in the cloud.

But this deal comes across as more of a partnership rather than just a strategic investment as defined by VMware.

Essentially, VMware is bringing its virtualization and cloud technologies to the table, integrating Puppet Labs software for its private and public cloud infrastructures, in particular.

Both companies will also jointly develop and sell management solutions for multi-vendor IT environments, including those supported by OpenStack and Amazon Web Services.

Puppet Labs founder and CEO Luke Kanies boasted in a blog post on Wednesday that his company's "sweet spot" centers around "cloud, DevOps, and the consumerization of IT," implying that Puppet's automation software can fill in some gaps for VMware.

Kanies explained:

Our shared goal in this relationship is to help IT organizations better manage and automate their infrastructure. Modern IT infrastructure is at a scale we've never seen before, yet our customers also have to move faster than ever, and they need to do it all while maintaining the same standards in security, compliance, and uptime. Virtualization and cloud technologies, such as those from VMware, are exactly what have enabled these new opportunities, and automation software like Puppet is needed to fully realize them.

Ramin Sayar, vice president and general manager of VMware's Cloud Infrastructure and Management unit, also chimed in, adding in a separate blog post that a big focus for this partnership will be software-defined datacenters.

Defining that these infrastructures demand automated provisioning and management, Sayar remarked that Puppet's "declarative, model-based approach" to IT automation is "completely aligned with the software-defined datacenter," thus attempting to frame this partnership as a win-win situation for both companies.