Company’s Total Sales Grew 188 Percent Year-Over-Year; Annual Recurring Revenue Quadrupled
Open Source Chef Community Grew More Than 200 Percent, Creating New Automation Skill Base
SEATTLE – February 12, 2014 – Chef™, the leader in IT automation, today announced surging adoption of its Chef™ IT automation platform. In 2013, the company’s total sales grew 188 percent year over year, while recurring revenue quadrupled. The number of new customers adopting Chef reached record levels in 2013, with nearly 70 percent of sales coming from Fortune 1000 organizations. The company’s European operations also achieved significant momentum, with total sales growing more than 400 percent, compared to 2012.
Interviews with a range of Fortune 1000 brands detailing their use of Chef to solve today’s hardest IT challenges can be viewed here.
“Our continued, strong sales and revenue growth coincides with the acceptance of Chef as the de facto standard for delivering speed and scale for both web innovators and forward-leaning enterprises,” said Barry Crist, CEO, Chef. “This is a special time for Chef and our community; as our business grows larger, our growth rate is also accelerating.”
Leading Industry Research Spotlights Transformative Shift in Enterprise IT
Recent research points to massive change and upheaval, as well as vast new opportunities, in enterprise IT. The Gartner Research document entitled, “Taming the Digital Dragon: The 2014 CIO Agenda,” (Dave Aron, Graham Waller), Dec. 31, 2013, states:
“Now we are entering a third era of enterprise IT, where these new trends are not only improving what businesses do with technology to make themselves faster, cheaper and more scalable, but fundamentally changing businesses with information and technology, changing the basis of competition and the portfolio of businesses people are in, and in some cases creating new industries.”
Today, the enterprise is rapidly adopting IT automation in response to these immense pressures. The Gartner Research document entitled, “Predicts 2014: Automation Brings Promise to IT Operations Management, but at What Cost?” (Jarod Greene, Ronni J. Colville, Ian Head, George Spafford, Jeffrey M. Brooks, Robert Naegle), Dec. 12, 2013, states:
“By 2015, 75% of large enterprises will have more than four diverse automation technologies within their IT management portfolio, up from less than 20% in 2013.”
Meanwhile, the continued adoption of cloud computing across businesses of all sizes is helping drive a new wave of automation platforms. As a recent Forrester Research, Inc. report, “Predictions for 2014: Cloud Computing” (Dec. 4, 2013), states:
“Chef and Puppet will usurp commercial automation solutions… Open source server configuration automation is quickly becoming the de facto cloud service automation approach and will dominate the management of elastic cloud workloads.”
Enterprise Chef Sales Surge
Chef’s sales in Q4 2013 alone nearly equaled sales for all of 2012. Fortune 500 companies in media, transportation, manufacturing, Big Web, retail, and financial services have all deployed Chef to maximize the benefits of DevOps strategies in accelerating time to market.
Enterprise Chef™ models IT infrastructure and application delivery as code. Enterprise Chef provides the integrated automation platform needed to succeed in today’s customer-propelled economy. Chef delivers the power and flexibility to move faster in a complex world – from rapid provisioning and deployment of IT resources to the automated delivery of applications and services – at any scale.
Chef Skills Footprint On the Rise
The Open Source Chef community grew more than 200 percent across all primary metrics in 2013, including millions of Chef downloads, hundreds of thousands of monthly Chef Cookbook downloads, and thousands of individual contributors. With tens of thousands of registered users contributing code and solving IT challenges every day, the Chef community is building a new generation of skilled automation professionals worldwide.
Continuing its commitment to the wider Chef community, Chef is sponsoring Ada Developers Academy, an intensive software developer training school for women. As part of its sponsorship, Chef will be providing an internship for an Ada Developers Academy student beginning in May. In the internship, the student will spend six months learning about and contributing code for the Chef IT automation platform. More information on Ada Developers Academy can be found here.
“The Chef Community is all about helping each other solve complex IT automation challenges, while transforming traditional IT to something focused on automation, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery,” commented Nathen Harvey, Community Director, Chef. “The Chef Community has always been a very open, welcoming community. Our participation in the Ada Academy is one example of how we’re bringing automation skills to IT professionals everywhere.”
#ChefConf 2014
#ChefConf 2014 is taking place at the Hyatt Embarcadero in San Francisco, April 15-17, 2014. Chef’s annual user conference is the largest, most vibrant gathering of New IT and DevOps practitioners, featuring three days of inspired discussions, collaborative presentations, technical training, and hands-on labs focused on automating business to hyper-speed. View the agenda here and register now to take advantage of early bird pricing before February 28.
#learnchef