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Puppet acquires data visualization startup Reflect

The IT automation company should be able to incorporate Reflect's capabilities into its products almost immediately.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer

The IT automation company Puppet announced Thursday that it's acquired Reflect, a three-year-old data visualization startup. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Reflect, which like Puppet is based in Portland, Oregon, raised $2.5 million in seed capital in 2016.

While most data visualization companies build products for end users, Reflect created a data-visualization-as-a-service platform, giving businesses and developers a way to add analytic capabilities into their own software. They can offer those capabilities to their own customers in existing products or as entirely new offerings.

Puppet should be able to incorporate Reflect's capabilities into its own products almost immediately, Puppet CEO Sanjay Mirchandani told ZDNet.

"We generate so much data, and we've got different visualization and reporting capabilities... but it's never enough," he said. Customers are looking for richer tools, he said, with more interactive capabilities, exstensibility and the ability to customize the way data is presented based on roles. With Reflect's capabilities integrated across all Puppet products, "the possibilities are endless," Mirchandani said.

Reflect co-founder and CEO Alex Bilmes echoed that sentiment, saying Puppet's "very diverse and broad data set" opened up plenty of possibilities.

While Tableau is best known for offering businesses data visualization tools, a number of enterprise players are incorporating those capabilities directly into their own offerings. Along with Puppet, Workday, Salesforce and SAP have recently done so.

As data grows more valuable to industries across the board, "data visualization is becoming a lot more integral to companies as a whole," Bilmes said.

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