HP and Chef issued a joint press release last week revealing their new partnership. HP Technology Services now offers Chef’s IT automation platform as part of its Datacenter Care service. The move is big news for both HP and Chef, and is yet another illustration of how DevOps is transforming enterprise IT.
The partnership makes sense. It’s hard to talk about DevOps without mentioning Chef, and virtually impossible to talk about enterprise IT without bringing HP into the conversation. The press release explains, “Enterprises in every industry are under significant pressure to deliver on-demand digital products and services to remain competitive. In doing so, they are adopting web-scale practices, including DevOps, to create more agile and resilient infrastructure.”
How does bringing Chef into the mix enable HP to help its customers achieve those goals? With capabilities for high availability, replication, and analytics, as well as comprehensive integration with all major operating systems and cloud providers, Chef gives enterprises a comprehensive platform for automating IT infrastructure and application delivery across Windows, Linux, and Unix, whether in a local datacenter, or a cloud environment.
This isn’t the first big news of the year for Chef. Earlier this year Microsoft jumped on the DevOps bandwagon by integrating Chef and Puppet Labs into the Azure cloud platform. Teaming up with HP is another significant rung on the ladder to making DevOps a mainstream enterprise concept.
I conducted a little Q&A with Ken Cheney, vice president of business development for Chef, about the new relationship with HP:
DevOps: What does this new relationship with HP mean for Chef?
Cheney: This is a multimillion dollar deal with HP—it’s the largest partner deal we’ve ever done. HP Technology Services is packaging Chef’s IT automation platform into its Datacenter Care offering, serving more than 2000 customers globally.
This represents significant validation for both Chef’s commercial automation platform and our market leadership. With HP’s channel, we can enter and help transform very traditional datacenters to adopt DevOps patterns, increase efficiency and reduce costs.
DevOps: In your opinion, what does it mean for HP?
Cheney: HP Technology Services will now offer Chef’s IT automation platform as part of its Datacenter Care—Infrastructure Automation offering. By turning infrastructure into code, HP will now enable even more IT agility and reliability for businesses.
DevOps: There are benefits for both Chef and HP, but the customers are what really matter. How does this partnership benefit Chef or HP customers, or IT admins in general?
Cheney: This new offering will enable HP’s enterprise customers to unify development and operations on a single codebase, accelerating software and application delivery, as well as ensuring maximum security and eliminating costs related to human error or system breaches.
DevOps: What impact does Chef’s partnership with HP have on DevOps in the enterprise?
Cheney: Today, every business must transform into a software company to compete in the always-on digital economy. This shift toward what is called “web-scale IT,” requires companies to embrace web-oriented architectures and open source software, automate operations and move services to the cloud, and take on new cultural practices based on the DevOps movement.
Our new partnership with HP is further validation that the DevOps movement is hitting the bow of the enterprise – we are working together to help deliver the web-scale architecture enterprise customers are looking for.
Only time will tell the true impact of this partnership, or how DevOps culture evolves in the enterprise. It’s safe to say, though, that the combination of Chef and HP is a powerful force, and that the partnership will make DevOps available to many large enterprise customers.
