Puppet Labs makes open source tools for automatically configuring servers. As companies have added more virtual machines to their data centers, they’ve been turning to tools like Puppet to manage them. It plays right into two of the other big trends in corporate IT: virtualization and cloud computing.
According to founder and CEO Luke Kanies, that $30 million investment is sign of how well the company is doing — in more way than one. VMware likes what’s it’s doing, but it doesn’t need than astronomical sums raised by the likes of Cloudera and 10gen. “We’ve gotten more cash from customers than we’ve gotten from investors,” he says. “We’re cash-flow positive. We’re not deep in debt and trying to figure it out.”
Why does the company need any funding at all? It’s expensive to get and keep enterprise customers. GitHub was profitable before it took $100 million in funding, and some new-age enterprise companies are raising even more. Dropbox has raised over $250 million.