Infrastructure automation firm Chef has raised about $105 million in funding. Now it is going to be acquired by Progress Software for $220 million. Progress is based in Bedford, Massachusetts, and said that Chef would contribute to Progress efforts.
Chef’s usefulness will be in helping Progress build, manage, deploy, and secure applications in multi-cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. Chef focuses on the automation of DevSecOps (secure agile development), infrastructure, application, and compliance.
They have more than $70 million in annual recurring revenue. This will be an excellent addition for the first fiscal quarter of Progress, which starts in December.
The low-profile of Progress
Progress was founded in 1981 and is one of the oldest independent software companies in the world.
Traditionally, the company has maintained a low-key presence. It has been held publicly since 1991 and has more than $425 million in revenue every year, with a global customer base of 100,000 enterprise rooms.
Their business covers many areas that include tools for building adaptive user experiences across devices, secure file transfers, web content management, machine learning for anomaly detection, network monitoring, and business rules automation.
Progress says that more than 2 million developers use their software.
Automation in the cloud
Chef, on the other hand, is a large player in the IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) market. They deal with things like tools to enable the automation of infrastructure configurations using scripts.
They use domain-specific language to write the code that performs complex configurations tasks in some of the largest public clouds.
It was founded in 2008, which gave it an early start in the automation market, but then Red Hat Inc. came along and acquired another player in the same market (Ansible). Since then, major cloud providers have integrated into their offerings the same service, providing competition.
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