When tech startups get an infusion of cash, they have a tendency to hire and acquire. Or sometimes combine the two with—get your buzzword bingo card out—acquihiring. So it comes as little surprise that Puppet Labs—who took in an additional $30 million, earlier this year—has acquired Cloudsmith, makers of Geppetto.
“The Cloudsmith team is stacked with an exceptional group of technologists who are influential and heavily involved in both the Puppet and Eclipse communities,” said Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs. “Like Puppet Labs, Cloudsmith cares about its products’ ease of use and has tremendous expertise in building great tools. We look forward to leveraging Cloudsmith’s experience and technology in our product suite to make automation accessible to an even larger segment of enterprise IT professionals.”
This marks the company’s second acquisition of a Puppet-focused company. Marionette Collective was acquired in 2010.
Mitch Sonies, founder and CEO of Cloudsmith, summed up the, ahem, mating dance of the marionettes like this:
The last two years went pretty much as we’d hoped. We were able to build two SaaS products on Puppet (Stack Hammer and Wham!) that worked exactly how we wanted. We found a way to both target developers and contribute to the community by developing an open source Puppet IDE, Geppetto, aimed primarily at Java developers (I personally thought it was a ridiculous idea, but I was totally wrong). Our collaboration with the Puppet Labs team got closer and closer.
By late last year, it was fairly hard to come up with a reason not to join forces. We were still completely aligned in terms of technology, complementary in terms of focus and experience and we knew each other really, really well. We took our time closing the acquisition, essentially integrating the two organizations as we went, so that we were able to function as a single company the day after the transaction closed.
According to Mike Rogoway at The Oregonian, the terms of the deal were not disclosed.
For more information, see Puppet’s press release and blog post.
