Mirantis has closed $10 million in financing from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital to drive its OpenStack initiatives
OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis announced on Thursday that it has closed $10 million in financing from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital to drive its initiatives around the open cloud software platform.
Mirantis offers a DIY Assist for OpenStack cloud, as well as OpenStack deployment and support services aimed at service providers, SaaS vendors and enterprises.
In an interview with Information Week, Mirantis president and CEO Adrian Ionel said it is looking for organizational support to help boost the reputation of the three-year-old startup.
Prior to the investment, Mirantis was funded purely from sales revenues. Some of its customers include Internap, PayPal, Gap, and AT&T. Mirantis said it has worked with clients in more than 30 OpenStack deployment projects in the past 18 months.
As OpenStack has grown, so has interest in the commercial side of the software platform, as well as demand for OpenStack skills in the job market. OpenStack training programs have emerged to equip workers for the demand in the specific skillset. While Rackspace was one of the first to launch a training program, Mirantis also offers training bootcamps that it said are ” very popular and are usually sold out.”
Recently, enterprise OpenStack company Piston Cloud Computing hired a new CEO so its former CEO Joshua McKenty could take on the role of CTO, focusing on developing new products for its customers and contributing to OpenStack in his role on OpenStack board of directors.
Mirantis co-founder and executive vice president Boris Renski also sits on the board of the OpenStack Foundation, and Intel and Dell are code contributors to OpenStack.
“We believe that OpenStack is on its way to becoming a universal control plane for the entire application infrastructure fabric,” Ionel said in a statement. “This phenomenon is transforming the industry. To help accelerate this transformation in a meaningful way, we need strong strategic investors like Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, and WestSummit Capital. We consciously picked investors who aligned with us on vision and our commitment to accelerate OpenStack adoption around the world.”
One of those areas ripe with cloud developers and enterprises looking to adopt OpenStack is APAC, according to Mirantis investor WestSummit, who has its headquarters in Palo Alto and Beijing.
“We see tremendous demand for OpenStack in the APAC market and China in particular. Beijing generates more traffic to the OpenStack.org Website than any other city in the world today, and China hosts some of the largest cloud deployments in the world. With our investment, we aim to help Mirantis establish a stronghold in the APAC market,” Elise Huang, partner at WestSummit Capital said in a statement.
Talk back: Do you expect there to be more investor interest in OpenStack companies this year? What are your thoughts on OpenStack and introducing OpenStack infrastructure in your own organization? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
