I’ve had the opportunity and pleasure of covering Puppet since Reductive Labs relocated to Portland in 2009. It’s been among the most interesting journeys of a company in the Portland startup community. And it’s been great to be part of that journey of observation. And even collaboration, as PIE, the organization I run, had the opportunity to work with Puppet, 2019-2020. But as with many journeys, they come to an end. As this begins to, today. Puppet is on the path to being acquired by Perforce.
“This acquisition expands our product offering by adding new capabilities for enterprise DevOps teams to manage and secure their critical infrastructure,” said Mark Ties, CEO of Perforce. “With Puppet, we will be providing our customers with access to a product portfolio that enables them to drive innovation on a global scale. We look forward to welcoming the Puppet team and continuing to offer the level of customer support, services, and community Puppet has established in the market.”
It wasn’t the expected end goal — many thought Puppet was headed toward an IPO — but it’s a reasonable one. As Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar shared:
There was a point in time where many of us, myself included, thought Puppet would be one of the great IPOs to come out of the Pacific Northwest. And for a company of our size, we’ve always punched above our weight. Luke Kanies, the founder of Puppet, was one of the original creators of the DevOps movement. With our iconic State of DevOps Report that has been produced for a decade, Puppet has massively influenced not just our slice of the DevOps market but DevOps as a whole. 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.
She summed up the journey like this:
[T]o those who have been following Puppet over the years, I want to say thank you. Thank you to Luke Kanies who had the courage and tenacity to do the hard work to create a new market and who trusted me to lead the company forward these last few years. Thank you to the Puppet open source community and our customers who have fueled our growth from day one. Thank you to the many team members (current employees, alumni, and fans) who have been the heart and soul of Puppet to this point. Thank you to our investors for believing and supporting us along this journey. And thank you to my amazing family (including my three now teenage kids) who supported me through the highs and lows of these last three years and gave me the opportunity to “do it all.”
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
For more information, see the Perforce press release and read the open letter by the Puppet CEO.
