Puppet Labs, the company behind Puppet, the leading open source data center automation and configuration management tool, today announced that John W. Rutherford, previously vice president of business development at MySQL, has joined Puppet Labs’ executive team as vice president of business development. He will report to Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs.

“Puppet has become a new force within the open source community by delivering the first reusable and portable infrastructure platform offering IT administrators the ability to deliver higher service levels by managing complex environments more effectively,” said John Rutherford. “Cloud computing solutions are becoming a scalable alternative to traditional data centers, and Puppet is there to meet the increased demand in a more cost-effective way.”

As the head of business development for MySQL, Rutherford was responsible for strategic partner collaborations designed to deliver new innovative solutions to the open source community. MySQL’s pluggable framework offers a unique opportunity for third parties looking to capture the attention of a fast-growing and evolving install base. MySQL’s fast growing open source footprint resulted in an acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2008 which surpassed all prior open source valuations equally $1 billion in consideration. Rutherford’s 20-year career in business development and sales have created many significant partnerships and delivered scores of landmark deals at Oracle, Iona, Borland and Informix Software.

“John’s ability to create meaningful partnerships has propelled several products into world-class leaders and is a key reason why I’ve invited him to join our executive team,” said Kanies. “His proven track record indicates a unique understanding and instinct for pursuing the kinds of relationships we need to achieve our goal of Pervasive Puppet.”

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