Application development provider Progress is acquiring DevOps provider Chef for $220 million in a deal that will broaden the former’s reach into the developer market. The deal comes on the heels of Chef CEO Barry Crist admitting that the firm was being “highly impacted” by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Progress CEO Yogesh Gupta explained in a blog post on the deal that Chef will bring “continuous application delivery, dependable compliance, and remediation automation” to Progress’ focus on application development. These features will be folded into Progress’ work on helping enterprises create and manage business applications. Specifically, Chef will provide its managed automation platform to help enterprises with their multi-cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

Gupta noted that the deal is also a step toward doubling the “company in five years by acquiring businesses that complement our portfolio, provide long term, sustained value to customers and can benefit from our scale and strength for greater success.”

Rob Lauer, senior manager for technical marketing and developer relations at Progress, said the Chef has proven itself as a valuable player in the DevOps space where Progress currently does not participate. "Clearly they've proven over time that the solutions they provide are providing true value to these customers as well," Lauer explained. "And I think Progress has a history of being able to take products companies like this and improving those over time."

Alongside the deal, Progress released preliminary results for the third fiscal quarter of its 2020 financial year that came in ahead of previous guidance. This included revenues of between $108 million and $110 million for the quarter, and an upgrade on its full-year revenue expectations to between $438 million and $442 million.

The deal also brings to an end Chef’s more than 10-year run as an independent cook in the DevOps space. The company had raised $105 million since its founding and CEO Barry Crist recently boasted that it had posted its tenth consecutive year of record revenues in 2019. He added that the company started 2020 with strong momentum, including its best Q1 ever with 100% growth over the previous year and being “firmly cash flow positive in the first quarter of this year.”

However, as part of Chef’s recent ChefConf virtual event, Crist said the company’s operating quarter was being hit by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Chef CTO Corey Scobie said in an interview with SDxCentral that despite the pandemic, Chef's "financial results and our success in market has actually been higher than expected given the pandemic and resulted in some of the best quarters in Chef's entire history. So I feel like there's a lot of tailwind going into this into this deal with progress and certainly look forward to continuing that pattern going forward."

Chef earlier this year launched a pair of new products designed to help enterprise IT departments manage the security of their diverse workforce from a single console. This included its Compliance platform that has an audit function allowing information security and security operation (SecOps) teams to maintain visibility over the compliance status of their operations. There was also a new Compliance Remediation tool that is targeted at helping infrastructure and operations teams to link their audit and remediation to support continuous compliance in an enterprise.

Those updates followed up on a significant move by Chef last year to revamp its development, platforms, and go-to-market strategy to more fully embrace the open source community.

The move included Chef developing and releasing all of its software under the Apache 2.0 open source license model. It also moved to build all of its different platforms from the same source code that is distributed to the open source community and will be distributed with commercial license terms.

Gupta noted in his blog post that Progress “will continue to nurture the vibrant and thriving Chef open source community.”

Chef had previously operated under a “loose open core model” where some of its platforms were open source and some were proprietary. Crist prior to the Progress deal said that the move toward open source was “working 100%” and that “the path we’ve chosen is performing.”

“The products are performing well, the company expects to be both cashflow positive and profitable, which is a really, really important milestone for companies like ours,” Crist said.

UPDATED: This story has been updated with comments from Progress and Chef.