Opscode, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that it has secured $19.5 Million in Series C funding. The lead investor for this round was Ignition Partners, with follow-on investments from Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The financing round, which was oversubscribed, will be used to fuel Opscode's rapid expansion of its software engineering, sales, marketing and business development efforts. The company also today announced that Ignition Partners' John Connors has joined Opscode's Board of Directors.

"This is an extremely exciting time for Opscode as it creates and leads the infrastructure automation market during a period of major IT transformation, driven by the rapid adoption of cloud computing and the 'DevOps' movement," said John Connors. "Ignition Partners didn't want to miss this opportunity to invest in Opscode, and I am thrilled to join the company's board."

"Opscode is experiencing incredible growth and attracting Fortune 500 enterprise customers at an unprecedented rate for a company at our stage," said Mitch Hill, CEO, Opscode. "This round of funding will enable us to further advance the innovation curve in cloud infrastructure automation and dramatically expand our market opportunity."

The widespread adoption of scale-out IT infrastructure, including virtualization and cloud computing, has created significant IT complexity and a skills shortage in the enterprise. While today's next-generation technologies have made accessing vast compute resources as easy as swiping a credit card, they have also created new challenges in managing these complex IT environments, requiring both new skills and solutions for managing and automating infrastructure.

Opscode's pioneering software, Chef, is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. No matter how complex the realities of business, Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout an entire infrastructure. Through a combination of configuration management and service-oriented architectures, Chef, Hosted Chef and Private Chef make it easy to create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure while simplifying systems management.