Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Chef, the popular automation service, today announced that it is open-sourcing all of its software under the Apache 2 license. Until now, Chef used an open core model with a number of proprietary products that complemented its open-source tools. Most of these proprietary tools focused on enterprise users and their security and deployment needs. Now, all of these tools, which represent somewhere between a third and a half of Chef’s total code base, are open source, too.

“We’re moving away from our open core model,” Chef SVP of products and engineering Corey Scobie told me. “We’re now moving to exclusively open-source software development.”

He added that this also includes open product development. Going forward, the company plans to share far more details about its roadmap, feature backlogs and other product development details. All of Chef’s commercial offerings will also be built from the same open-source code that everybody now has access to.

Scobie noted there are a number of reasons why the company is doing this. He believes, for example, that the best way to build software is to collaborate in public with those who are actually using it.

“With that philosophy in mind, it was really easy to justify how we’d take the remainder of the software that we produce and make it open source,” Scobie said. “We believe that that’s the best way to build software that works for people — real people in the real world.”

Another reason, Scobie said, is that it was becoming increasingly difficult for Chef to explain which parts of the software were open source and which were not. “We wanted to make that conversation easier, to be perfectly honest.”

Chef’s decision comes during a bit of a tumultuous time in the open-source world. A number of companies like Redis, MongoDB and Elastic have recently moved to licenses that explicitly disallow the commercial use of their open-source products by large cloud vendors like AWS unless they also buy a commercial license.

But here is Chef, open-sourcing everything. Chef co-founder and board member Adam Jacob doesn’t think that’s a problem. “In the open core model, you’re saying that the value is in this proprietary sliver. The part you pay me for is this sliver of its value. And I think that’s incorrect,” he said. “I think, in fact, the value was always in the totality of the product.”

Jacob also argues that those companies that are moving to these new, more restrictive licenses, are only hurting themselves. “It turns out that the product was what mattered in the first place,” he said. “They continue to produce great enterprise software for their customers and their customers continue to be happy and continue to buy it, which is what they always would’ve done.” He also noted that he doesn’t think AWS will ever be better at running Elasticsearch than Elastic or, for that matter, at running Chef better than Chef.

It’s worth noting that Chef also today announced the launch of its Enterprise Automation Stack, which brings together under a unified umbrella all of Chef’s tools (Chef Automate, Infra, InSpec, Habitat and Workstation).

“Chef is fully committed to enabling organizations to eliminate friction across the lifecycle of all of their applications, ensuring that, whether they build their solutions from our open-source code or license our commercial distribution, they can benefit from collaboration as code,” said Chef CEO Barry Crist. “Chef Enterprise Automation Stack lets teams establish and maintain a consistent path to production for any application, in order to increase velocity and improve efficiency, so deployment and updates of mission-critical software become easier, move faster and work flawlessly.”

Trello, the organizational tool owned by Atlassian, announced an acquisition of its very own this morning when it bought Butler for an undisclosed amount.

What Butler brings to Trello is the power of automation, stringing together a bunch of commands to make something complex happen automatically. As Trello’s Michael Pryor pointed out in a blog post announcing the acquisition, we are used to tools like IFTTT, Zapier and Apple Shortcuts, and this will bring a similar type of functionality directly into Trello.

Screenshot: Trello

“Over the years, teams have discovered that by automating processes on Trello boards with the Butler Power-Up, they could spend more time on important tasks and be more productive. Butler helps teams codify business rules and processes, taking something that might take ten steps to accomplish and automating it into one click,” Pryor wrote.

This means that Trello can be more than a static organizational tool. Instead, it can move into the realm of light-weight business process automation. For example, this could allow you to move an item from your To Do board to your Doing board automatically based on dates, or to share tasks with appropriate teams as a project moves through its life cycle, saving a bunch of manual steps that tend to add up.

The company indicated that it will be incorporating the Alfred’s capabilities directly into Trello in the coming months. It will make it available to all levels of users, including the free tier, but they promise more advanced functionality for Business and Enterprise customers when the integration is complete. Pryor also suggested that more automation could be coming to Trello. “Butler is Trello’s first step down this road, enabling every user to automate pieces of their Trello workflow to save time, stay organized and get more done.”

Atlassian bought Trello in 2017 for $425 million, but this acquisition indicates it is functioning quasi-independently as part of the Atlassian family.

HashiCorp, the company that has made hay developing open-source tools for managing cloud infrastructure, obviously has a pretty hefty commercial business going too. Today the company announced an enormous $100 million round on a unicorn valuation of $1.9 billion.

The round was led by IVP, whose investments include AppDynamics, Slack and Snap. Newcomer Bessemer Venture Partners joined existing investors GGV Capital, Mayfield, Redpoint Ventures and True Ventures in the round. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $179 million.

The company’s open-source tools have been downloaded 45 million times, according to data provided by the company. It has used that open-source base to fuel the business (as many have done before).

“Because practitioners choose technologies in the cloud era, we’ve taken an open source-first approach and partnered with the cloud providers to enable a common workflow for cloud adoption. Commercially, we view our responsibility as a strategic partner to the Global 2000 as they adopt hybrid and multi-cloud. This round of funding will help us accelerate our efforts,” company CEO Dave McJannet said in a statement.

To keep growing, it needs to build out its worldwide operations and that requires big bucks. In addition, as the company scales that means adding staff to beef up customer success, support and training teams. The company plans on making investments in these areas with the new funding.

HashiCorp launched in 2012. It was the brainchild of two college students, Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, who came up with the idea of what would become HashiCorp while they were still at the University of Washington. As I wrote in 2014 on the occasion of their $10 million Series A round:

After graduating and getting jobs, Hashimoto and Dadgar reunited in 2012 and launched HashiCorp. They decided to break their big problem down into smaller, more manageable pieces and eventually built the five open source tools currently on offer. In fact, they found as they developed each one, the community let them know about adjacent problems and they layered on each new tool to address a different need.

HashiCorp has continued to build on that early vision, layering on new tools over the years. It is not alone in building a business on top of open source and getting rewarded for their efforts. Just this morning, Neo4j, a company that built a business on top of its open-source graph database project, announced an $80 million Series E investment.

UiPath is bringing automation to repetitive processes inside large organizations and it seems to have landed on a huge pain point. Today it announced a massive $225 million Series C on a $3 billion valuation.

The round was led by CapitalG and Sequoia Capital. Accel, which invested in the companies A and B rounds also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $408 million, according to Crunchbase, and comes just months after a $153 million Series B we reported on last March. At that time, it had a valuation of over $1 billion, meaning the valuation has tripled in less than six months.

There’s a reason this company you might have never heard of is garnering this level of investment so quickly. For starters, it’s growing in leaps in bounds. Consider that it went from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in under 21 months, according to the company. It currently has 1800 enterprise customers and claims to be adding 6 new ones a day, an astonishing rate of customer acquisition.

The company is part of the growing field of robotic process automation or RPA . While the robotics part of the name could be considered a bit of a misnomer, the software helps automate a series of mundane tasks that were typically handled by humans. It allows companies to bring a level of automation to legacy processes like accounts payable, employee onboarding, procurement and reconciliation without actually having to replace legacy systems.

Phil Fersht, CEO and chief analyst at HfS, a firm that watches the RPA market, says RPA isn’t actually that intelligent. “It’s about taking manual work, work-arounds and integrated processes built on legacy technology and finding way to stitch them together,” he told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year.

It isn’t quite as simple as the old macro recorders that used to record a series of tasks and execute them with a keystroke, but it is somewhat analogous to that approach. Today, it’s more akin to a bot that may help you complete a task in Slack. RPA is a bit more sophisticated moving through a workflow in an automated fashion.

Ian Barkin from Symphony Ventures, a firm that used to do outsourcing, has embraced RPA. He says while most organizations have a hard time getting a handle on AI, RPA allows them to institute fundamental change around desktop routines without having to understand AI.

If you’re worrying about this technology replacing humans, it is somewhat valid, but Barkin says the technology is replacing jobs that most humans don’t enjoy doing. “The work people enjoy doing is exceptions and judgment based, which isn’t the sweet spot of RPA. It frees them from mundaneness of routine,” he said in an interview last year.

Whatever it is, it’s resonating inside large organizations and UiPath, is benefiting from the growing need by offering its own flavor of RPA. Today its customers include the likes of Autodesk, BMW Group and Huawei.

As it has grown over the last year, the number of employees has increased 3x  and the company expects to reach 1700 employees by the end of the year.

 Last week, we reported that UiPath, a startup out of Romania building AI-based services for enterprises in the area of robotic process automation (RPA) — helping businesses automate mundane tasks in back-office IT systems — was about to close a big round, upwards of $120 million at a $1 billion-plus valuation. Today, the company is making it official (and officially… Read More

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