Progress Software ($PRGS) is acquiring DevOps and DevSecOps software specialist Chef for $220 million in cash, or roughly 3 times annual recurring revenues, the companies say.
This is M&A deal 358 that ChannelE2E has covered so far in 2020. See the full M&A deal list here.
Chef, founded in 2008, offers software to assist partners and customers with continuous automation, application and DevSecOps. Key offerings include Chef Enterprise Automation Stack, Chef Infra, Chef InSpec, Chef Habitat, Chef Compliance and Chef Desktop.
Used by more than half of the Fortune 500, Chef develops 100 percent of its software as open source under the Apache 2.0 license with no restrictions on its use, the company says. Chef Enterprise Automation Stack, a commercial distribution, is developed solely from that open source code and unifies security, compliance, infrastructure and application automation with observability.
Chef launched an overhauled channel partner program in February 2020. Key Chef partners include Indellient, Relevance Lab, Climb Channel Solutions, eBusiness-design, tecRacer. Orasi, ImmixGroup and Carahsoft, among many others.
Progress, led by CA Technologies, Fatwire and Kaseya veteran Yogesh Gupta, offers software to help partners develop, deploy and manage business applications.
Progress serves more than 100,000 enterprise customers, six million business users, and an ecosystem of over two million developers. Moreover, Progress's channel partner ecosystem spans over 1,700 independent software vendors (ISVs), VARs, and systems integrators, the company says. Those partners will now extend Chef's global reach, a spokesperson for Progress asserts.
Progress Acquires Chef Software: Executive Perspectives
In a prepared statement about the M&A deal, Gupta said:
“Chef is a market leader with best-in-class products, a vibrant developer community, an impressive blue-chip customer base and highly skilled and engaged employees. Chef has built a successful business, product portfolio and go-to-market strategy and we will expand and accelerate that by bringing our resources to bear, building on the momentum Chef has established to date.
This acquisition perfectly aligns with our growth strategy and meets the requirements that we’ve previously laid out: a strong recurring revenue model, technology that complements our business, a loyal customer base and the ability to leverage our operating model and infrastructure to run the business more efficiently. We’re thrilled to add Chef to our product portfolio and are confident that this acquisition will provide benefit to both organizations, as well as our customers, partners, investors and the Chef community.”
Added Barry Crist, CEO of Chef:
“Chef and Progress share a vision for the future of DevSecOps and Progress will provide the scale to further drive Chef’s platform forward and deliver additional value to our customers. At the same time, Chef fills a need in the Progress portfolio in DevSecOps, infrastructure, application, and compliance automation that is highly complementary to its existing products. For Chef, this acquisition is our next chapter, and Progress will help enhance our growth potential, support our Open Source vision, and provide broader opportunities for our customers, partners, employees and community.”
The acquisition is expected to close in October 2020, the companies said.
