This year we picked five startups commercializing open source projects that look especially strong going into 2012. The list is in no particular order.

Opscode is the company behind Chef, a configuration automation tool popular among DevOps practicioners. Opscodes offers a hosted version of Chef called Chef Hosted and the on-premise enterprise focused offering Chef Private. The core team came to Opscode from Amazon and Microsoft.

One of Opscode’s biggest competitors is Puppet Labs, which is also one of our Open Source Startups to Watch. The open source version of Puppet (as opposed to Puppet Labs’ Puppet Enterprise) has had widespread adoption than the open source version of Chef, due in part to its ease of use. But as I wrote before, that shouldn’t be taken as a reflection of Opscode as a company.

According to Opscode VP of Marketing Jay Wampold, the company’s 2011 revenue was over 10x its 2010 revenue, thanks to the launch of Chef Private. That’s largely due to Opscode’s success in the enterprise, where Wampold says Opscode has not lost any engagements to Puppet Labs. Wampold credits Opscode’s success on Chef’s scalability. “Since we’ve been running the Chef SaaS, we have a lot of experience with scale-out,” he says.

Chef is also the foundation of Crowbar, an open source tool from Dell that speeds the deployment of private cloud technology like OpenStack, Apache Hadoop and Cloud Foundry. Opscode has an informal relationship with Dell, working very closely with Dell and Rackspace on Crowbar and OpenStack.

The adoption of big data tools like Hadoop and Hbase is necessitating the adoption of the DevOps approach to managing infrastructure and applications. Expect Opscode, Chef and Crowbar to get bigger as more companies implement tools like Hadoop and OpenStack.

“Lots of innovation starts with Web companies,” Wampold says. “But there are a lot of big companies that are early adopters and lots of people from those Web companies moving over and taking jobs at larger companies and bringing new approaches with them. We’re definitely in a scale-out period.”

Opscode counts Admeld, Cycle Computing and Rhapsody as customers, and its future looks bright as DevOps, big data and the cloud become more mainstream.

More Open Source Startups to Watch

Puppet Labs

Revolution Analytics

Joyent

Opscode

Talend