Looks like there is money to be had in open source configuration management.  Portland, OR-based Puppet Labs, makers of the Puppet configuration management tool, landed $8.5 million in Series C Financing. Among the investors: VMware, Google, Cisco, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners.

Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs, writes on the Puppet Blog: As trends go, while at times it’s difficult to separate reality from hype, it’s clear that virtualization and cloud computing are disrupting our industry at every layer in the stack. Amidst this chaos, VMware has carved-out impressive leadership in virtualization and private cloud computing.  And Google, in order to scale their businesses to meet exponentially growing demand, pioneered many of the concepts of cloud computing that are just now being commercialized for the broader market. Such partners provide us with an incredibly powerful crystal ball into the dynamics and impact of these trends.

With these disruptive trends, we see our mission as enabling customers to take full advantage of their resulting benefits; thus the desire to work with partners who understand our customer, the system administrator.  Here, both VMware and Cisco are trusted, strategic partners of IT organizations worldwide; they understand the challenges facing system administrators to deliver ever shorter change cycles while maintaining enterprise-class service levels.  Working together, we’ll be able to build software that allows system administrators to deliver business-critical results with both higher quality and greater agility.

With Puppet Labs earning enough accolades to earn cash, I wonder what this means for other companies that create IT automation tools. Are more tech investors and other software companies going to sink more dough into similar companies? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.