Months after it overhauled its entire product strategy around its open-source principles, Chef has some new ideas to make money off the looming masses of cloud computing holdouts.
Chef plans to introduce several new features to its newly christened Enterprise Automation Stack, a commercial distribution of Chef’s open-source projects that the company introduced earlier this year, in kicking off ChefConf 2019 Tuesday in Seattle. They include a new cloud-migration tool that can help potential customers ready their applications for cloud computing, as well as a new dashboard that the company says will improve visibility across applications.
Chef is trying to make its products easier to use, and by extension, easier for enterprise companies that have yet to embrace cloud-native ideas to get up and running, said Brian Goldfarb, chief marketing officer for Chef.
“When we talk about the Enterprise Automation Stack, this is really our efforts to take a set of disparate products that were working together and bring them together under one distribution,” Goldfarb said. The overhaul of Chef’s products around a new open-source philosophy took several months, according to company representatives, and it is now starting to see what current and potential customers want as they modernize their technology infrastructure.
The Chef EAS Migration Accelerator promises to make it easier to move aging applications into cloud computing environments by finding all the dependencies in Microsoft Windows applications and repackaging them in a Chef-friendly way, cutting down the amount of time required to get older applications into Chef’s system.
This is an interesting year for Chef, one of the seminal infrastructure-as-code companies courting data center customers that has had to adjust to the cloud computing era, and fast. The company has gone through some rough patches over the past few years but appears to have righted itself in 2019, touting record revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018 and reorganizing the company around an application-focused open-source strategy amid a swell of uncertainty around open-source enterprise-computing companies.
Nell Shamrell-Harrington, principal software development engineer at Chef, led that product shift and will discuss that process in greater detail at our GeekWire Cloud Summit on June 5th in Bellevue.
Chef executives are expected to share more details about the new product direction and the company in general during ChefConf 2019, which kicks off Tuesday at 9am PT.
