VMware has put $30 million in Puppet Labs, forming a strategic partnership with the young automation company to deliver management solutions for virtualization and the cloud in heterogeneous multi-vendor IT environments.
The investment, structured as a D round, follows VMware’s participation in Puppet’s $8.5 million C round in late 2011 along with Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures and Radar Partners.
Altogether Puppet has gotten $45.5 million.
VMware’s money will let Puppet accelerate product development, move into new geographies and have the virtualization king peddling its wares. Puppet has great ambitions to be to VMware what VMware was to EMC – the “next big, public IT management vendor for the next 10, 15 years.”