Puppet use has been growing in enterprises, with the provisioning tool now being used inside 75% of the Fortune 100. But there’s one thing that Puppet hasn’t offered that enterprises consider an absolute must: high availability (HA). That changed today as the company released Puppet 2016.5.
This update gives the Puppet platform a verifiable high-availability plan, said Tim Zonca, vice president of marketing at Puppet. He pointed to the maturation of Puppet use inside enterprises as the prime motivator for adding HA to the platform.
“Implementations of Puppet are becoming more strategic,” said Zonca. As such, he said enterprises were concerned about “Puppet as a single point of failure. Customers were doing HA stuff with us, but it became apparent that this is something we should give our customers.”
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Puppet itself underwent some major changes back in April, when Sanjay Mirchandani came on board as president and COO. Previously, the company had been headed by its founder and Puppet author Luke Kanies, who built Puppet to solve problems he encountered in his life as a systems administrator.
Kanies stepped down from a day-to-day role within the company in September, but remained on its board of directors. Mirchandani has since taken over as CEO. The company has also added former Riverbed senior vice president Mike Guerchon, as Chief People Officer, and ex-VMware vice president of worldwide sales for networking and security, Gary Green.
These hires have built a new Puppet in the past few months, one that is heavily focused on enterprise sales. Of Mirchandani, Kanies said he is “way better at building a coherent go-to-market than I am. All the geeks think marketing doesn’t matter, but the fact is marketing matters. What we’re trying to do requires us to be everywhere in the world,” said Kanies, during the transition in April.
