This morning we made several exciting announcements.
First, we changed our company name to Chef. While the Opscode name served us well, it is time to leave it behind. I like both the simplicity of Chef, as well as the clarity. Chef was birthed and developed by this team with, of course, non-trivial contributions from what is now an amazingly broad Community. While there are many terrific organizations that build on Chef as part of their own solution, there is only one Chef, the company. And from a practical standpoint, Chef enjoys tremendous brand recognition; it is also simpler to invest in one brand than two. You will now be able to find us at www.getchef.com.
Second, we have closed $32 Million in a Series D round of funding that brings Scale Ventures and Citi Ventures to the team. The round also included full participation from our existing investors Ignition Partners, DFJ, and Battery Ventures. We’ve also welcomed Scale’s Rory O’Driscoll to our Board of Directors.
This financing would not have been possible without the robust Chef Community. We are incredibly grateful for the tremendous support of our Community, which has been a significant part of our success. Thank you. Together, there is much more to accomplish. Our additional capital allows us to make more meaningful investments in both our Community and commercial operations. More to come on both fronts.
One of our areas of investments will be in people. You’ll see us roughly double in size over the next year. We’ve already expanded our executive team and recently have added some terrific talent to the team.
Curt Anderson joins Chef as CFO from Microsoft where he played a number of key roles including CFO of their Server and Tools group and the GM of their investor relation team. He’s also the Treasurer of a terrific Seattle organization, Child Haven. I’ve known Curt for a decade; I’m thrilled to have him join.
And more good news: Tucker Callaway joins Chef as our VP of Enterprise. Tucker’s background includes key sales leadership and technical roles at Nimsoft, CA, and Mercury. And Tom Murphy joins Chef as VP of Services, having previously been Apptio’s VP of Customer Success; Tom is also a Mercury alum. Both Tucker and Tom are great additions.
In the coming months we’ll be hiring more developers, success engineers, solution architects, and sales reps to list a few. We’re looking for great people, especially Chef bad-asses. If you believe that you’d be a good fit and are interested, please drop us a line!
If you didn’t catch it, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the top priorities for Enterprise IT in 2014. The full report– “IT Speed: The Crisis and the Savior of the Enterprise” – can be downloaded here. As the title suggests, it’s all about speed in IT, especially in a world filled with digitally enabled customers across every industry.
We’ll be posting a series of blogs examining the study’s findings in the coming days and weeks, so stay tuned for more on this research soon. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out an Infographic we’ve created illustrating the Forrester study’s findings and the route to achieving customer speed with automation.
And lastly, I wanted share a great article about Mitch Hill, our previous CEO, who passed away last week (see my previous blog). You can find the Geekwire article here.
Barry
