Mirantis Co-Founder Freedland Returns as CEO

Leadership transition focuses on integration, execution and customer success

CAMPBELL, Calif., January 10, 2024 – Mirantis today announced a transition in leadership, naming its former CEO and co-founder Alex Freedland as CEO. Current CEO, Adrian Ionel, will step down effective January 11. 

Freedland is a co-founder of Mirantis, and has continuously stewarded the company throughout its history, as company chairman, board member and CEO. An open source pioneer, he championed Mirantis’ early investment in enterprise open-source, helping to win a portfolio of some of the world’s most demanding deployments across a diverse collection of customers. He was a co-founder and the chairman of the finance committee of the OpenInfra Foundation and was named by Business Insider as one of the 39 Most Important People in Cloud Computing.

Ionel, also a co-founder, played an instrumental role in building Mirantis into a prominent force in the industry. He will transition to serve as an advisor to the company to allow him to focus on family responsibilities, including caring for his young children. As CEO, Ionel led the acquisitions of Docker Enterprise, amazee.io, Shipa, and the assets of Kontena (Lens). Under Ionel's tenure, Mirantis achieved sustained profitability and successfully established itself as a leading company in cloud-native infrastructure. 

“Once again, we are in the middle of one of the most exciting periods in the history of computing, more than ever led by open source innovation. Mirantis will continue to apply our experience of bringing together the best of open source and harnessing it into secure, reliable, and scalable solutions that our customers demand to stay ahead of their competition,” said Freedland. “The company's unique combination of innovation DNA, flexibility, and operational expertise sets it apart in the competitive landscape.”

Mirantis acquired Docker Enterprise in 2019 and immediately integrated the technology into its Kubernetes platform. Today, nearly 1000 customers use Mirantis cloud native platforms as a foundation for their digital transformation initiatives. Staying true to the company’s commitment to open source innovation, Mirantis invested heavily in Lens and pioneered the development of k0s and has continued to innovate with the latest capabilities in multi-cloud computing through K0smotron. Today, more than 1 million people use Lens Desktop to make them significantly more productive when developing and operating Kubernetes applications. Mirantis Lens and Mirantis Lagoon (from amazee.io) were both finalists in the InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards 2023.