This week’s Smart IT roundup features Chef’s new acquisition and a buyback program for businesses looking to improve automated document management.

Chef acquires Tower 3, launches new products

Chef, a provider of web-scale IT automation, announced its acquisition of Tower 3, a Big Data and analytics startup. The acquisition comes alongside notable growth for Chef in the second quarter of 2014, as well as new products.

In a blog post, the company reported incremental recurring revenue growth of 182 percent year-over-year in Q2 2014, as well as growth in its Global 2000 customers by 100 percent.

Its acquisition of Tower 3 will add significant engineering resources and expertise to its existing analytics development efforts.  Chef introduced new products and features such as the Chef action log, which publishes notifications regarding who is changing things on the Chef server.  This allows administrators to track cookbook usage, roles, environments, and changes to the infrastructure just by accessing the easy-to-use dashboard.

Chef also introduced the new build of Chef Client called Chef Container which integrates with all Linux containers, including Docker, which allows for the seamless management of container resources.  Chef will also be releasing a Knife Plug-in for Docker integration with Chef Container to allow users to users to launch, configure and manage Docker containers.

TIS’s buyback program helps automation improvements

Top Image Systems, Ltd., a provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Business Process Management (BPM) solutions and Mobile Imaging Platform (MIP), announced its buyback program to allow businesses stuck with poor document capture solutions to upgrade to its flagship product eFLOW for no additional license investment.

eFLOW has been awarded the highest rating by Forrester Research in the areas of intelligent data capture, OCR support, language support, document classification, multi-tiered architecture, and mobile capture.

The Buyback Program includes a complimentary advanced capture discovery session with expert technical consultants; competitive software buyback for the cost of a three-year commitment of existing maintenance and support; co-marketing agreement in exchange for competitive software swap out; and any necessary scoping and statement of work issued by TIS professional services.  Those who have invested in competitive software are eligible for the buyback program.

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