I was one of the founders of mValent and served as CTO until Oracle acquired the company in 2009.
What did mValent do? Well, consider the task of managing configuration files for things like Apache, Django, Postgres and Linux. Imagine doing that across multiple applications, at varying stages: QA, staging, production. Now imagine doing that in situations where it's all happening on hundreds of servers and different people are responsible for different parts of the configuration. mValent helped manage all that (although we tended to do a lot more J2EE than LAMP-like stacks)