Seattle-based automation software developer Opscode said today it has raised $11 million in a Series B financing led by Battery Ventures. This latest round of funding includes a follow-on investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which led the company’s $2.5 million Series A round back in April 2009.
Opscode plans to use the money to hire more engineers, boost its sales and marketing efforts, and explore new areas of R&D. Battery Ventures General Partner Sunil Dhaliwal will also be joining Opscode’s board as part of the investment deal.
“We are witnessing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make world-class IT infrastructure available to the masses,” Dhaliwal said in a company statement. “While legacy vendors have made billions solving discrete automation problems for very large organizations, the future belongs to those that can deliver simple, scalable automation to any IT user, regardless of their size or sophistication.”
The advent of cloud computing and virtualization has made it easier and faster for companies to create new servers in response to growth. But according to Opscode, the process gets bogged down around building the infrastructure for each new server. This is where Opscode steps in-with configuration management. It provides a tool that allows companies to automate infrastructure for desktops, servers, datacenters and the cloud, with an eye toward enabling growth at small and large companies. Last year, the company released “Chef,” an open source systems integration framework. In a short period of time, it has grown into the largest open source configuration management project worldwide, with over 150 individuals and 25 companies on the list of contributors, including Rackspace, RightScale and VMware‘s Spingsource division. The program allows engineers and software developers to manage servers and applications by writing source code that describes the parameters of each part of its infrastructure and how it fits into their greater architecture. That eliminates the need to run commands by hand. Websites currently utilizing “Chef” include Etsy, IGN Entertainment, Scribd, Wikia, 37Signals and White Pages.
Alongside Opscode’s funding news, the company announced later today the limited beta release of the “Opscode Platform,” which it calls the first hosted configuration management service in the world. The new product should streamline “Chef” and make it more powerful, Opscode said.
