Company’s Q2 Incremental Recurring Revenue Grows 182 Percent Year-Over-Year with a Quarterly Record Number of New Customers
New Chef Capabilities for Automated Infrastructure Testing, Container Integration, and an Analytics Platform Bring Benefits of Web-Scale IT to the Enterprise
SEATTLE – July 15, 2014 – Chef, the leader in web-scale IT automation, today announced strong business growth for the second quarter of 2014, demonstrating surging demand for its commercial automation platform. Chef also today released new enterprise product features that expand the Chef platform, powering speed, scale, and consistency for enterprise companies who want to accelerate time to market and delight customers through web-scale IT strategies.
Web innovators like Amazon, Facebook, and Google have changed customer expectations about on-demand digital products and services. To meet these expectations, enterprises must adopt practices of the web innovators and make their infrastructures more agile and resilient. Research firm Gartner estimates that “by 2017, Web-scale IT will be an architectural approach found operating in 50 percent of global enterprises, up from less than 10 percent in 2013.”[1]
News Highlights:
Chef has examined the practices of hundreds of its customers who have successfully implemented web-scale IT and found that they all use automation to achieve a consistent infrastructure, follow DevOps practices, have comprehensive insight into IT operations, and actively encourage innovation. With new product offerings for each of these patterns, Chef is the only automation platform that gives enterprises the capability to operate at web scale.
– Strong Business Growth: Chef’s sales continue to accelerate, with the company’s incremental recurring revenue growing 182 percent year-over-year (YoY) in Q2 2014. Chef’s customer acquisition is also surging, with new Global 2000 customers growing 100 percent YoY in Q2. Chef acquired a record number of new customers in the second quarter.
– Community Momentum: Chef’s open source platform recently reached more than 10 million lifetime downloads, demonstrating tremendous growth in the Chef Community. Chef also recently launched the new Chef Community site – Supermarket – and is hosting its annual Community Summit October 2-3 in Seattle, featuring two days of open space sessions, brainstorming, and events for all Chef contributors.
– New Analytics Platform, Acquisition of Tower 3: Chef’s new analytics platform provides full visibility into all activity on the Chef server and lays the foundation for audit and compliance capabilities. Chef recently acquired big data and analytics startup Tower3, adding significant engineering resources and expertise to its ongoing analytics development efforts. Now available to Chef subscribers is the new Chef action log, which publishes notifications on who is changing what on the Chef server and allows administrators to track cookbook usage, roles, environments, and changes to infrastructure, all through an easy-to-use dashboard.
– Test-Driven Infrastructure: Test-driven infrastructure ensures maximum IT safety and consistency with programmatic and automated testing of the entire stack. Chef is the first company to offer its customers commercial support for test-driven infrastructure. Chef has also created a single installation package – Chef DK – for the open source tools covering the entire test and development workflow, from the workstation all the way to production. Rally Software is among a range of enterprise customers using Chef for a test-driven approach to infrastructure and applications (see separate release).
– End-to-End Container Workflow Automation: Chef is the first automation platform to deliver end-to-end management of container workflows. Chef Container is a build of the Chef Client that integrates with all Linux containers (LXC), including Docker, to enable seamless management of container resources. In conjunction with Chef Container, Chef is also releasing a Knife Plugin-in for Docker integration with Chef Container, enabling users to launch, configure and manage Docker containers. Together, Chef’s new suite of container tools and content fully automate the creation, management, monitoring and testing of containers, making them versionable, testable, and repeatable within a production workflow.
– Web-Scale IT Whitepaper: Continuing the evolution of IT that began with virtualization and then progressed to the cloud, web-scale IT represents the next wave in business technology. It advocates DevOps, the use of open source software, and adoption of continuous delivery principles – and automation is its foundation. Chef’s new whitepaper, “Automation and Web-Scale IT” defines how businesses can use IT automation to develop and release code rapidly and safely, enabling them to release applications at hyper speed and delight customers.
Supporting Quotes:
“Today, every business is a software business. Customers everywhere expect delightful and immediate services. Meeting these expectations is only possible through the speed, scale, and consistency provided by employing web-scale IT. Chef’s IT automation platform packages the success patterns of web innovators and delivers them to the enterprise.”
– Barry Crist, Chief Executive Officer, Chef
Additional Resources:
About Chef
We are Chef – the leader in web-scale IT automation. We give you a model for automating IT infrastructure and applications that drive self-reliance across your development and operations teams. We are the Chef community. We are tens of thousands strong. We are helping your businesses become faster, safer and more flexible, so you win in today’s 24×7 digital economy. Join our movement today. www.getchef.com
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[1] To read the Gartner press release about web-scale IT, go to http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2675916.