Mirantis receives $10 million from Intel Capital, WestSummit Capital, and Dell Ventures to Accelerate its OpenStack Game

Mountain View, California, January 10, 2013 – Mirantis, the largest OpenStack® systems integrator, today announced that it closed $10million in growth capital financing fromDell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital.

Combining its efficient delivery model with the intellectual property that makes building a vendor-agnostic OpenStack cloud simple and predictable, Mirantis is striving to dramatically accelerate the adoption of OpenStack clouds by service providers, SaaS vendors, and enterprises.

The investment will be used to accelerate Mirantis’ growth in the OpenStack market. The privately-held company was previously financed through sales revenues. As Mirantis increases its presence in the OpenStack market, it will remain true to its focus of providing a vendor-neutral implementation of OpenStack, free of lock-in hooks or proprietary packaging.

Mirantis was an early OpenStack advocate, since the open source project was introduced in 2010 and recently joined Dell and Intel as founding members of the new OpenStack Foundation. Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and executive vice president,was elected to the board of the Foundation, which provides leadership to the community and guidance over development efforts.

“We believe that OpenStack is on its way to becoming a universal control plane for the entire application infrastructure fabric,”observed Adrian Ionel, president and CEO of Mirantis. “This phenomenon is transforming the industry. To help accelerate this transformation in a meaningful way, we need strong strategic investors likeDell 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.”

Mirantis has the largest pool of engineering expertise in OpenStack in the market today, and helps service providers, SaaS vendors, and enterprises build and run OpenStack cloud infrastructure. It has provided this expertise to customers in more than 30 OpenStack deployment projects in the past 18 months.Mirantis has helped many early adopters of the OpenStack platform successfully launch production-grade clouds. Customers include organizations such as NASA, WebEx, Gap, PayPal,  and Internap.

“Mirantis is a true example of the power of OpenStack technology,” said Lisa Lambert, vice president of Intel Capital and managing director of the Software and Services sector. “In just a short amount of time, Mirantis has established itself as a key OpenStack systems integrator by helping numerous early adopters realize the value of the open source cloud movement. Intel Capital looks forward to working with its team as it continues to expand its global footprint.”

“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,” explained Elise Huang, partner at WestSummit Capital.

“OpenStack is a central component of Dell’s cloud strategy and this investment reflects our company’s commitment to open source platforms that give our customers more options and flexibility. We recently announced OpenStack as our open source cloud platform of choice for public and private clouds. The partnership with Mirantis demonstrates our commitment to the community and our goal of becoming a leading contributor to OpenStack. Dell continues to make strategic investments that enhance our portfolio and customer value,” noted Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president of Dell Cloud.

Mirantis has dedicated developers contributing to OpenStack Quantum LBaaS and helps run the Bay Area OpenStack user group in Silicon Valley. The company also offers a training program to expand the pool of skilled engineering talent and expertise in OpenStack. Mirantis’ ongoing ‘Boot Camps’ have become very popular and are usually sold out.

“Mirantis has been very active in helping promote and grow the OpenStack ecosystem. This is a significant accomplishment for the company. We welcome the activities that prominent Foundation members take together to help accelerate OpenStack adoption,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation.

Dell and Intel are active participants in the OpenStack community. WestSummit Capital is a China-based global growth stage technology investment firm that invests in industry-leading technology companies with a substantial presence or strategic interest in China.