Reductive Labs should fill out the Little 4
This is a post from Luke's old blog; it is saved here statically for historical purposes, as of October 2008
Michael Cote and John Willis have been talking for a while about the Little 4 in management software, and it looks like Qlusters is no longer on the list.
I'd love to be able to comfortably say that Reductive Labs deserves to fill that fourth slot (you can have your say too). The truth is, of course, that all of those companies are far larger than Reductive Labs, and they've all successfully gotten investment while we have not (although we haven't tried all that hard). The products of the companies are pretty dissimilar, too -- they're mostly more focused on monitoring rather than what I would call management, as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, Puppet has a lot of traction, and is a clear leader in its space. We've been profitable since almost the beginning (which is to say, profitable enough to pay my meagre wages), and we've got a great and growing community. Now that Andrew Shafer has joined the company full-time as a partner, I do think we're going to start growing, and it's well-timed in terms of how the community is developing.
I do hope we grow this year, but I don't really know how we will. I'm still considering how hard we should be seeking investment, but it seems that VCs are pretty uninterested in infrastructure (or maybe they're just uninterested in me). Really, I'm hoping I can just get a big enough customer base that Andrew and I can build a bigger development team and start doing some of the almost-obvious but really interesting projects to enhance the Puppet ecosystem, like change control applications.
But the summary is, I want to deserve to be in the Little 4, and I think Puppet is popular enough that we just might, but there's still lots more to do.
