ACADEMIA

New Context has announced a new partnership with Chef, the leader in web-scale IT automation, to further the goal of enabling business transformation through automation customized to organizations' specific needs. The collaboration is intended to address the need for greater flexibility and adaptability in enterprise IT infrastructure, driven by tremendous recent gains in business operations efficiency and an active software community innovating and improving performance.

The increase in data volumes across enterprises presents daily challenges for systems administrators to manage, and significant strategic hurdles for CIOs and CEOs who rely on those systems to service their customers and organization. Before companies can optimize their clouds or secure their data, automating their infrastructure systems is a critical first step. Chef's technologies allow that automation to be continued through application deployment.

"New Context was originally founded to help companies achieve effective cloud orchestration, data assurance and continuous deployment and integration of their systems architecture," said Daniel Riedel, CEO of New Context. "Our relationship with Chef aligns with our mission for architecting technology services that scale, optimize and secure enterprises' data – their most valuable asset."

In addition to announcing the new partnership, New Context is sponsoring #ChefConf 2014, an annual gathering for the Chef community featuring technical workshops, keynotes from leaders in DevOps and IT automation and working sessions, beginning today through April 17 at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. To kick off the event, the company is also hosting the conference's signature HackDay today at the New Context San Francisco headquarters, 717 Market Street, Suite 100, from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. PDT. Media are invited to attend.

"New Context's expertise in designing, managing, and servicing web-scale systems makes them a strong consulting resource for Chef customers," said Tom Murphy, vice president of services for Chef. "In fact, they're already working with a range of organizations to maximize the power of the Chef automation platform in those environments. We're excited for some great things ahead, beginning with their Hack Day at ChefConf this year."