Opscode, a company that provides cloud infrastructure automation for the enterprise, has raised $19.5 Million in Series C funding led by Ignition Partners, with Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson participating in the round. The company also today announced that Ignition Partners’ John Connors has joined Opscode’s Board of Directors. This latest investment brings Opscode’s total funding to $33 million.
Opscode provides companies the ability to develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale in the cloud or behind the firewall. Basically, the company’s offering allows developers and engineers to define what infrastructure they want to build and then manage these complex systems in a number of environments.
Opscode’s software, Chef, is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically
for automating the cloud. Mitch Hill, CEO of Opscode, says Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications within infrastructure. The company also offers a version of Chef for private clouds, which Hill says has been receiving a lot of attention from the enterprise.
For example, music service Rhapsody uses Opscode in the cloud. And Ancestry.com uses the offering to develop behind the firewall. Hill says that the company mainly faces competition from old school system managements services offered by IBM, HP, and BMC, which were developed a number of years ago. Hill maintains that Opscode’s Chef works with the cloud, and is able to rapidly deploy changes, while also promising scalability.
Currently, Opscode has hundreds of paying customers, and thousands of users (some are using the service for free).
The financing round, which was oversubscribed, will be used toward building the company’s software engineering, sales, marketing and business development teams.