News

Biz App Maker Progress to Acquire DevOps Pioneer Chef

• By John K. Waters
• September 8, 2020

Business applications provider Progress today announced the pending acquisition of Chef, a provider of open-source continuous automation software and one of the pioneers of the DevOps movement.

"Chef is a market leader with best-in-class products, a vibrant developer community, an impressive blue-chip customer base, and highly skilled and engaged employees," said Progress CEO Yogesh Gupta, in a statement. "Chef has built a successful business, product portfolio and go-to-market strategy and we will expand and accelerate that by bringing our resources to bear, building on the momentum Chef has established to date."

The Chef configuration management and automation platform uses a pure-Ruby domain-specific language for writing system configuration "recipes," which can be combined into "cookbooks" for easier management. Based in Seattle, Chef-the-company was an early innovator in the DevOps space, and currently bills itself as a DevSecOps provider. "DevSecOps" integrates DevOps with security practices and the "Security as Code" concept.

Last year, Chef's management made the decision to expand the scope of its open-source licensing to include 100% of its software under the Apache 2.0 license.
The company's product portfolio now includes the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack, Chef Infra, Chef InSpec, Chef Habitat, Chef Compliance, and Chef Desktop.

Progress makes a leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications. Analyst firm Gartner has classified the company as a "multiexperience development platform (MXDP)" provider. It's product suite offers development teams an opinionated and integrated set of front-end development tools and back-end services that enable distributed and scalable development (both in teams and architecture) of fit-for-purpose apps across digital touchpoints and interaction modalities.

The acquisition of Chef will enhance the company's position by providing industry-leading compliance and application automation products for multi-cloud and on-prem infrastructure, the company said.

"Chef and Progress share a vision for the future of DevSecOps and Progress will provide the scale to further drive Chef's platform forward and deliver additional value to our customers," said Chef CEO Barry Crist, in a statement. "At the same time, Chef fills a need in the Progress portfolio in DevSecOps, infrastructure, application, and compliance automation that is highly complementary to its existing products. For Chef, this acquisition is our next chapter, and Progress will help enhance our growth potential, support our Open Source vision, and provide broader opportunities for our customers, partners, employees and community."

Progress is acquiring Chef for $220 million in cash, the company said. The deal is set to close in October.