Chef's New CMO Presents Company as Partner on DevOps Journey

On Feb. 12, Chef announced the appointment of Brian Goldfarb as its Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

In his statement, Goldfarb attributed Chef's success to its partnership with the "open source community." Part of Chef's marketing strategy is to align its product's value proposition as a helpful partner on customers' DevOps journeys – a means to achieve touted benefits of the DevOps movement, such as increased security and reliability of services as well as faster delivery of new features through the software development lifecycle.

Chef's marketing strategy aligns with a broader trend in the industry to provide value to enterprises through support and services for open-source software, rather than by selling enterprise software licenses. Such organizations are able to crowdsource their development efforts and involve their customers in their development teams through collaborative online communities.

Our Take

As the shift toward selling support and services continues, Info-Tech expects that marketing strategies such as Goldfarb's will continue to emphasize the role of vendors as trusted service providers selling advice and expertise, rather than as software engineers selling tools that provide value with out-of-the-box functionality.

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