Google’s investment arm Google Ventures along with Cisco and VMware has led a series C round of funding for Puppet Labs, which raised $8.5 million.

Puppet Labs, which was founded by CEO Luke Kanies back in 2005, specialises in making system administration tools.

According to the company, Google Ventures, Cisco and VMware join existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners. Counting the latest series C round of funding, the company has now raised a total of $15.75 million from investors.

Puppet Labs, which recently launched its Puppet Enterprise 2.0 software, has more than 250 customers including Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Stanford University.

The company started out as an open source firm, with developer communities in North America, India, Europe, China and Japan.

“The participation of these new investors in this latest round reinforces our lead in providing powerful IT automation tools for system administrators, whether deploying applications on-premise or in the cloud,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs.

“Together, we are well-positioned to enable IT organizations to fully capitalize on the tectonic shifts of virtualization and cloud computing in their delivery of business results.” he added.

Chief Executive of Cisco Systems, John T. Chambers, claims he has successfully and largely finished the task of reshaping the company.

After Cisco, which manufactures many of the components needed to run the Internet, declared its fiscal first-quarter results, Chambers commented, “We’ve taken 4 to 5 inches off our waistline,” as reported by the New York Times.

Cisco, for the current year, is hoping to fair better after cutting down on their consumer business as well as cutting 5,400 jobs.

With this quarter, Cisco Systems has had two very successful quarters under the leadership of Chambers. The chief executive has coined this as “the aggressive, the focused, the simplified Cisco”.

Not a very long time ago, the San Jose, California based company was accused by Wall Street for being unfocused as well as unrealistic regarding their prospects of growth as compared to competitors.

In view of the recent growth as well as figures, Eric Suppinger, an analyst with JMP Securities said, “It is better than what I was projecting……revenue was a little ahead of consensus, and the gross profit margins held,” as reported by the New York Times.

Source: Erica Thinesen