IT automation

Puppet Labs Scores $8.5M In New Funding From Cisco, Google Ventures And VMware

November 29, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Puppet Labs, a provider of IT automation software for system administrators, today announced the closing of $8.5 million in Series C financing. New investors Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware join existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners.

With the $8.5 million investment, Puppet Labs has now raised a total of $15.75 million.

The company now boasts more than 250 customers including Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University.

In January, Puppet Labs expanded beyond its open source roots and announced Puppet Enterprise, the first commercial version of Puppet, its IT automation solution for system administrators.

In September, Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 2.0 at its annual user conference, PuppetConf. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 has opened new markets for Puppet Labs in making the provisioning, configuring, and managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure dramatically easier for system administrators.

iWave Software Debuts Automator, Will It Please IT Administrators?

June 24, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

iWave Software, a 15-year old maker of IT integration software, today announced its entry into the IT process automation market with the introduction of iWave Automator.

iWave Automator is a platform designed to automate data center support processes (run book automation) and to integrate IT system management (ITSM) applications. iWave Automator aims to enable IT organizations to automate, standardize and enforce best practices, lowering their operating costs and improving application availability, while maintaining compliance in their virtualized and physical data centers.

iWave Automator says it provides IT administrators with two options for automating their virtual or physical data center environments. Administrators can use iWave’s graphical process design environment to create automations specific to their organization’s unique business needs or implement iWave Accelerators, pre-built IT automation workflows that automotive specific tasks using ITIL compliant processes.

The platform consists of the following components:

iWave Adapters: iWave offers over 40 pre-built adapters for IT service management (ITSM) applications. iWave Adapters support all of the popular ITSM applications that span the ITIL Service Support disciplines including service desks, event, problem, change, configuration and release management.
iWave Accelerators: iWave Accelerators are pre-built workflows that administrators can download and import into their iWave Automator environments. iWave Accelerators help administrators automate common IT management tasks including virtual server management, configuration and compliance management.
iWave Designer: A graphical user interface that provides administrators the tools required to create IT process automation workflows and integrations quickly and easily.
iWave Management Console: A Web-based console that provides administrators the ability to monitor the health of the iWave Automator environment as well as their ITSM workflows and integrations.

Tideway Announces Availability Of Tideway Foundation 7.1

April 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Tideway, a London-based provider of IT automation software, today announced the availability of Tideway Foundation 7.1. The latest version of Tideway’s application dependency mapping (ADM) solution allows users to identify what has changed in their IT environment and why, view authorized, approved and expected changes, and carve out slices of data for more individualized and powerful reporting.

From the press release:

“Developed in collaboration with Tideway’s customer advisory board, Foundation 7.1’s new change control capabilities enable users to define a baseline “approved” state for their environment and compare all observed changes to the approved and expected states of that environment. This sophisticated change intelligence goes beyond merely providing data and offers users suggestions about what action should be taken to reconcile and explain discrepancies between the approved environment and the “as is” state captured by Foundation. Users can delve deeper into Foundation data to troubleshoot and determine the authorization status of specific lifecycle changes.”

“Foundation 7.1 also offers enhanced capabilities for managing virtual environments and controlling virtual machine (VM) sprawl. The cross-platform and vendor-agnostic solution allows users to monitor the appearance, disappearance and migration of virtual hosts and reconcile those changes directly with their authorization status to help eliminate unnecessary outages and excessive license charges.”

[Source: Virtually Speaking]