Mirantis Names Co-Founder Alex Freedland to Succeed Departing CEO

Company co-founder and chairman Alex Freedland succeeds chief executive Adrian Ionel

Mountain View, CA — October 1, 2015 — Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, today announced that company chairman Alex Freeland will succeed Adrian Ionel as chief executive. Ionel, who joined Mirantis’ founding team in 2009 and helped build the company into a global leader for cloud infrastructure, is leaving to launch a new venture. He will remain a board advisor and large shareholder.

Freedland, who co-founded Mirantis, most recently served as president of the company and oversaw the raising of $100 million in new investment funding led by Intel Capital.

“My six years at Mirantis have been a tremendous blessing and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to work with so many amazing colleagues,’’ Ionel said. “Together we’ve built a company with a very bright future and I know Alex and the team will do a spectacular job taking it forward.”

Freedland said Mirantis is ideally poised for the increasing adoption of open cloud infrastructure.

“With Adrian at the helm, Mirantis has become the leader in the open cloud movement,” Freedland said. “We are one of the top two contributors of OpenStack and helped many leading Global 2000 enterprises successfully build and operate open clouds. It has been an amazing journey and I am very grateful to Adrian for getting us into the pole position for the mass adoption of the open cloud.”

Freedland brings more than 20 years of executive management and community program leadership to Mirantis. A board member of the OpenStack Foundation since its inception, Freedland is a serial tech entrepreneur. In addition to most recently leading Mirantis’ financial operations, he also oversaw the company’s OpenStack software community contribution strategy.

“Alex brings a unique combination of a founder’s passion, intimate understanding of the company culture and hands-on involvement with the OpenStack community,” said Dharmesh Thakker, board member of Mirantis, and the former managing director of Cloud and Big Data at Intel Capital, who led the initial venture investment in Mirantis. “We are excited to see Mirantis, with Alex at the helm, guide Global 2000 enterprises on their journey to the open cloud.”

During his tenure as CEO, Ionel led Mirantis’ investment in OpenStack and the company’s growth from a handful of customers to more than 200 enterprises. The company established a worldwide presence and raised nearly a quarter billion dollars in investment.

Jeff Horing, managing director of Insight Venture Partners and a Mirantis board member, applauded Ionel for his service. “Adrian led Mirantis’ growth into a global OpenStack software and solutions powerhouse,” he said. “We’re deeply grateful to him for laying the foundation for this hugely successful company. The executive team and board wish him well on his next venture.”