Perforce Software has been building developer tools since 1995, a long time in the tech world. The company was acquired by Clearlake Capital in 2018 and has modernized and expanded its reach through acquisitions in recent years. Today, the company announced that it plans to acquire Puppet, the infrastructure automation company.
The companies have not disclosed the terms of the deal.
Tim Russell, CPO at Perforce says the acquisition adds an element to the company’s toolkit that it was missing. “So Perforce is a market leader in DevOps, but focused more on planning through DevOps verification phases, i.e. planning and testing. And so we see that this acquisition is actually a really good fit, because it gives us access to operations now,” he said.
He added that the company has a long history of serving similar clients to Puppet and that was one of the reasons they went after it. Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar says she was originally looking for funding to drive inorganic growth through acquisitions when Perforce knocked.
“Essentially the market is moving so fast and despite the fact that I am very proud of the biological development side with [our products]I felt like we weren’t moving fast enough organically to really keep up with what our customers needed,” she said.
“I was actually planning on raising money to help Puppet do inorganic acquisition on its own. And what happened is in that process, I met the team at Perforce… and the more we talked, the more it became clear that I could achieve all those things I wanted in terms of access to capital to build the Puppet portfolio itself. to actually grow [by joining forces with them]†
She said she didn’t have to sell, but she felt she could do so much more as part of a well-capitalized company like Perforce, with two private equity firms in Clearlake Capital and Francisco Partners backing it.
The hope is that the company’s success with open source and commercial customers will continue under the Perforce umbrella, while expanding that foundation with a number of strategic acquisitions of its own. Perforce will continue to let Puppet do what it’s been doing all these years, while finding ways to integrate it into Perforce’s wider platform where it makes sense.
Puppet has raised nearly $190 million since its founding in 2009. The latest raise was a $40 million debt round from Black Rock in 2020.
The deal is subject to standard regulatory approval, but is expected to close in May.
This post Perforce adds infrastructure automation tooling with Puppet acquisition – TechCrunch was original published at “https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/11/perforce-adds-infrastructure-automation-tooling-with-puppet-acquisition/”