Bringing Order to Data Chaos

As cloud computing has taken off, companies have built ever-larger data centers that increasingly tax the ability of staffers to manage them. Two Pacific Northwest companies, Puppet Labs and Chef, are here to help. They’re taking on the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, BMC Software, and CA Technologies in what market researcher IDC calls a roughly $2 billion business to help companies make all those servers work more efficiently together. On top of that, there’s a growing corporate demand for software that can better manage computer networks or fine-tune a server system that handles terabytes of data, everything from streaming songs to document-sharing apps.

Puppet, in Portland, Ore., and rival Chef, based in Seattle, have helped develop open-source management software used by companies such as Google and Twitter. The two young companies make money, though not much, by customizing versions of the software for clients such as PayPal, Square, and Salesforce.com and advising them how best to use it.