DevOps automation firm Puppet acquires Reflect for its data visualization tools

Source – siliconangle.com

Cloud automation company Puppet Inc. will add data visualization capabilities to its list of services after acquiring a startup called Reflect Technologies Inc. Thursday.

Founded in 2015, Reflect is based in Portland, Oregon, just like its new owner. The company previously raised $2.5 million in a seed capital funding round in 2016. The terms of the deal, which sees Puppet acquire both Reflect’s products and its team of less than 10 people, were not disclosed.

Reflect will be absorbed into Puppet, with its Chief Executive Officer Alex Bilmes reporting to Puppet Chief Product Officer Omri Gazitt.

Reflect differs from other data visualization companies that build products for end users, because it offers its products as a service, enabling businesses to add analytics capabilities to their own software. Those businesses can then offer data visualization capabilities to their own customers.

With the acquisition, Puppet will take Reflect’s technology and integrate it with its own products. They include Puppet Enterprise, which is used by developers to manage infrastructure and applications across the software delivery pipeline. Puppet Enterprise automates the underlying infrastructure applications are running on by using code to configure things such as servers and virtual machines. It also helps to automate functions such as code review, testing, continuous integration and deployment to speed up application development. Puppet also offers a free, slimmed-down version of that platform, called Puppet 5.

Puppet already provides some data analytics with its products, but the company wants to expand on this, its Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mirchandani (pictured) told ZDNet.

“We generate so much data, and we’ve got different visualization and reporting capabilities… but it’s never enough,” he said.

Last September, Puppet acquired a continuous delivery automation software company called Distelli Inc. Puppet later announced three new products based on the technology it acquired from Distelli, including Puppet Pipelines for Applications, Puppet Pipelines for Containers and Puppet Container Registry. The pipelines products provide for continuous integration and delivery for applications and Kubernetes clusters, while the open-source container registry hosts Docker images to provide a unified view of container images.