Today, Puppet revealed details of its strategic plan to “give every organization the shortest path to better software” with announcements of new leadership, updated branding, deeper support for contemporary technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes and Mesosphere DCOS and notable integrations with platforms such as HipChat and Splunk. On the leadership front, Puppet announced that Sanjay Mirchandani, former VMware Senior Vice President and General Manager of VMware Asia Pacific and Japan, joins Puppet as its first President and COO to assume responsibility for the company’s go-to-market strategy and its execution. The Puppet President and COO will take over marketing, pre-sales, partnerships, professional services and customer support. With respect to branding, the company has changed its name from Puppet Labs to Puppet and correspondingly revamped and updated digital and paper collateral, including the domain name for the company’s website. Meanwhile, Puppet’s product development news features the announcement of Project Blueshift and Puppet Enterprise 2016.1. Project Blueshift demonstrates a systematic commitment to helping organizations deploy and manage contemporary technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere DCOS, Consul and CoreOS. Importantly, Project Blueshift underscores Puppet’s commitment not only to facilitating the operationalization of transformative contemporary technologies into contemporary DevOps deployments, but also its commitment to supporting IT automation in the context of emerging technologies more generally as evinced, for example, by its exemplary track record of supporting automation within OpenStack deployments. Puppet Enterprise 2016.1 boasts enhanced orchestration functionality as well as interactive visualization which allows teams to visualize dependencies in infrastructures managed by Puppet, thereby augmenting troubleshooting capabilities and enabling capabilities for infrastructure optimization.
Today’s announcement also elaborates on Puppet’s integration with the communications platform HipChat that empowers DevOps teams to take advantage of HipChat’s chat functionality to enhance collaboration with respect to the implementation of DevOps practices. Puppet also reveals details of a new Splunk application that gives enterprises greater visibility into their implementations of DevOps practices and processes. Taken together, today’s announcements point to a decisive shift in Puppet’s strategy whereby it stands poised to aggressively court the enterprise market with the appointment of Sanjay Mirchandani as President and COO, continue enhancing its own IT automation platform and deepen its integration with third party technologies that support software development. The announcements underscore Puppet’s investment in consolidating its leadership in contemporary DevOps with a multi-pronged strategic roadmap featuring the ratcheting up of its operations with respect to marketing, sales, product development, partnerships and integrations. The appointment of Mirchandani, in particular, promises to accelerate Puppet’s go-to-market results and give it an even deeper footprint in the contemporary enterprise that enable it to weigh in even more powerfully on the direction of contemporary DevOps, particularly given increasing competition from a multitude of contemporary DevOps players.
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