I attended (in the line of duty one might say) a couple of talks from the folks at Puppet Labs last Thursday (2nd) after they had finished a training course in London. A couple of interesting things occured to me as a result.

Firstly Puppet Labs could be a version of RedPixie in the future. They have grown from 4 people startup a year ago to 30ish now doing product development and professional services to a number of large organisations.

Secondly, R.I. Pienaar gave a talk on m-collective, recently acquired by Puppet Labs. What struck me about this is that it is very, very similar to a product that myself and a colleague wrote six years ago. Methinks ours was better because it did not require an agent to be installed on each client :-). Functionally it looked 99% the same, from what I could tell from one rather short talk.