Progress Expands DevOps Portfolio with Chef Acquisition

The DevOps market is continuing to move forward in the COVID-19 era, as evidenced by the announcement on Sept. 8 that software vendor Progress Software is acquiring Chef in a deal valued at $220 million to grow its DevOps portfolio.

Chef is a pioneer in the DevOps space and had raised $105 million in funding. It was founded in 2008 as Opscode and rebranded as Chef in December 2013.

Alongside the acquisition of Chef, Progress, which has a broad portfolio of application development, monitoring and networking tools, announced its preliminary third quarter fiscal 2020 financial results with revenue expected to be in the range of $108 million to $110 million. This is the second major acquisition by Progress in as many years. In 2019, Progress acquired data file transfer and network management vendor Ipswitch for $225 million.

"Chef has been a true pioneer in the DevOps movement, and this acquisition will extend Progress' offering in that ecosystem, which has become increasingly important as teams look to rapidly develop and deploy consistent, reliable, high performance and secure systems," Yogesh Gupta, CEO of Progress, said during a Sept. 8 conference call with press and analysts. "Chef's automation platform allows teams to build, deploy, manage and secure any application running on almost any infrastructure."

Chef's DevOps Portfolio

Chef has been busy growing its DevOps portfolio in recent years. Among its core products are Chef Infra, which provides infrastructure automation capabilities, and Chef Habitat, which delivers application development and delivery capabilities.

At the ChefConf 2020 virtual conference that took place in June, the company announced a pair of new offerings. Chef Compliance helps enable compliance with best practices and security policies. Chef Desktop brings the DevOps model to the desktop, with automation and management for endpoint devices.

Gupta noted that Chef had approximately $70 million in annual revenue, of which 95% is recurring in nature from subscriptions to its software services. He added that the Chef portfolio is complementary to what Progress offers. While he didn't provide specific details on how Chef will be integrated into Progress, Gupta emphasized that the goal is to continue to build on top of Chef and extend the platform to meet customers' needs.

Open Source

In April 2019, Chef announced that all of its platforms would be based on open source software. It's a commitment that Progress expects to honor.

Gupta said it is his intention to continue to show support for Chef's vibrant open source community and overall commitment to open source.

"There have been more than 40 million downloads of all of the Chef products over the years, and hundreds of thousands of organizations have benefited from Chef's offerings," Gupta said. "The open source community has been a key ingredient of this success, and we expect that to continue in the future."