Mirantis

Mirantis and OpenStack

OpenStack is an open source software platform for cloud computing infrastructures, coordinated by the OpenStack Foundation to promote the "development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud software." Mirantis has been a top contributor to the OpenStack project. Mirantis works with clients to build out open private, public, and service-provider cloud solutions based on OpenStack, using open source tools to integrate the computing, network and storage capabilities which define an OpenStack infrastructure. The Wall Street Journal characterizes OpenStack as providing "a kind of dashboard to help manage large numbers of servers, storage and networking devices like they were a single resource. Mirantis sells a commercial version and helps customers develop and install the software."

In two rounds of fund-raising in January and June 2013, Mirantis raised $10 million in funding from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital, and a further $10 million from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP Ventures. In October 2014, Mirantis raised $100 million in a Series B financing round led by Insight Venture Partners, and joined by existing investors Intel Capital, WestSummit Capital, Telefonaktiebolaget L.M. Ericsson and Sapphire Ventures. In August 2015, Intel led an additional $100 million funding round with new investor Goldman Sachs and existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

OpenStack

Mirantis announced its own OpenStack distribution in October 2013, in competition with distributions from Red Hat, Hewlett-Packard and others. The Mirantis OpenStack distribution works with various operating systems, including Red Hat, CentOS, and Ubuntu Linux.

Other delivery form-factors for Mirantis OpenStack include the Mirantis NFV Reference Platform, a reference architecture for Mirantis OpenStack designed to efficiently host, orchestrate and scale virtualized network functions in ways compatible with the ETSI-NFV specification.

Mirantis Unlocked Appliances are turn-key, scalable modular racks, with Mirantis OpenStack pre-installed and pre-tested on select hardware in reference configurations optimized for different workload types, sold and supported in collaboration with Mirantis Certified Rack Partners. The first Unlocked Appliance, for Cloud Native Apps, incorporates hardware and software from Dell, Juniper and Intel.

OpenStack community involvement

Mirantis founders, Alex Freedland (CEO) and Boris Renski (CMO) serve on the OpenStack Foundation Board and were most recently re-elected in January 2016. Mirantis contributes to many core OpenStack projects and leads projects in OpenStack core and Big Tent, including:

As of April 18. 2016, Mirantis was the largest code-committer to OpenStack Newton, with 24% of all commits recorded.

Partnerships

Mirantis works with partners under its Unlocked program to validate infrastructure and solutions with releases of Mirantis OpenStack. In September, 2015, Mirantis launched a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) initiative with partners Citrix, Metaswitch Networks and Overture Networks, under its Unlocked program.

In 2013, Red Hat announced that it would partner with Mirantis in offering the Mirantis Fuel solution to optimize deployment of Red Hat OpenStack.

In November 2013, Mirantis partnered with VMware to help VMware clients build OpenStack private clouds on VMware vSphere virtualized servers. The partnership was described as "unlikely," because of the perceived competition between OpenStack and VMware's vCloud suite.

In April 2014, Mirantis entered into an initial five-year partnership with the Swedish communications technology and services vendor Ericsson to provide OpenStack software on the Ericsson cloud platform which hosts telecommunications networks, internal data centers, and cloud computing services for Ericsson's clients. This was described as the largest deal to date for OpenStack software.

In May, there were reports that Red Hat would no longer provide support to Linux customers using non-Red Hat versions of OpenStack. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Even some of Red Hat's largest partners say its actions contradict the spirit of the open-source community. ...Last November, Red Hat ordered its employees to stop working with Mirantis, a startup that sells a subscription and support for a commercial version of OpenStack. Red Hat (had) partnered with Mirantis and invested in the company last June."

One month later, in June 2014, Mirantis partnered with Canonical, the UK-based company which provides commercial support for Ubuntu and other operating systems, in a project to ensure that Ubuntu is supported on Mirantis OpenStack, rather than exclusively on Canonical's own OpenStack distro. This was seen by some as, in part, a response to Red Hat's refusal to support Linux customers using non-Red Hat versions of OpenStack. One Forbes analyst wrote: "It's a win/win. Both companies get to look like the good guys. There’s a business development angle to all of this and best (if you’re Canonical or Mirantis anyway), it’s another chance to make Red Hat look like the big bad wolf in the proverbial OpenStack forest."

The following month, computer technology and enterprise software vendor Oracle announced a partnership with Mirantis which will provide support for deploying OpenStack clouds in alignment with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM distributions. This followed Oracle's decision earlier in the year to allow customers to use OpenStack cloud software with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that competition for OpenStack business sales among vendors like Mirantis, Red Hat, Cloudscaling, and others, is focused on a "potentially large pie. Business sales related to OpenStack will exceed $1.7 billion by 2016."

In October, 2015, Mirantis announced formation of a joint-venture company with China's largest public cloud provider, UCloud, to accelerate adoption of OpenStack.