Why Puppet? Opportunity, Impact, Leadership.
In 2014 (a million years ago in cloud native terms), I decided I wanted to work on technology that was changing the way applications were developed and managed. Pivotal had recently spun out of VMware and was developing something called Cloud Foundry, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). I was intrigued by the impact such a platform could deliver to enterprises trying to digitize their businesses to compete in the internet-first economy. Shortly after I joined Pivotal, Cloud Foundry was donated to a new open source software foundation, called Cloud Foundry Foundation. For me, it was a no brainer to move to the Foundation, an organization helming the community and ecosystem developing Cloud Foundry.
By all measures, Cloud Foundry has been a resounding success. It has created tens of billions of dollars in value. More than half of the Fortune 500 are using the technology in production today, and four of the Digital Nations standardized on the technology. It has ushered in a new way of thinking, with technologies like Kubernetes, Envoy, and now Istio integrated into the platform. Cloud Foundry continued to build on the cloud native ethos to enable businesses to develop and deploy cloud applications faster than ever before.
Given my experiences at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, when I took a seat on the Product Advisory Board of Puppet in early 2019, I could quickly tell what I was getting into. I had that same feeling. I saw a technology, and a product, changing the state of hybrid cloud. And more so — I saw a technology, and a company, not getting the credit it deserved — a company that led the DevOps movement, ushered in the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and helped drive efficiency through automation for, I quickly learned, more than 80 percent of the Global 5000.
In a word, I saw opportunity.
This is why I am so thrilled to say that I’m joining Puppet as CTO. My focus is on accelerating the impact Puppet can have across its stellar group of global 5000 customers, many who are struggling to manage, scale and innovate their infrastructure in an increasingly hybrid world. To provide clarity and consistency around who Puppet is (and has always been): a platform built for enterprise platform teams.
And I’ll get to continue to do some of the things I’ve loved while at Cloud Foundry Foundation — identify integration opportunities and help cultivate a vibrant ecosystem of services and capabilities that extend the value of Puppet for customers and define and lead the next phase of accelerated expansion.
Why am I so excited about Puppet?
What first caught my attention about Puppet was the leadership. Yvonne Wassenaar, took over as CEO in January 2019, and since then has really transformed the leadership team. The team she has pulled together is one of the smartest, and kindest, leadership team I have ever seen. Then, as I got the opportunity to meet more people at Puppet and in the Puppet community, I was blown away by the level of talent and commitment. It’s one thing to have great technology, but really quite another to have such a fantastic team of people and passionately engaged community around that technology.
On the technology front, Puppet expertly delivers the tools platform teams need to stop reacting and start leading. In short, making infrastructure actionable, scalable, and intelligent. Today, the largest enterprises around the world use Puppet to contain costs, drive compliance, enhance security and enable innovation.
From my unique vantage point, Puppet is the company most well-positioned to drive the shift coming in the way infrastructure is managed — from on premise to the cloud, all the way to the edge.
