Mirantis and UCloud Launch Joint Venture in China

New company, called UMCloud, already boasts customers including Shenzhen Stock Exchange; committed to long-term investment in China market and open cloud computing

Mountain View, CA — October 27, 2015 — Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, and UCloud, China’s largest independent public cloud provider, today announced a joint venture to accelerate adoption of OpenStack as the leading open cloud infrastructure solution for finance, telecom, state-owned enterprises and large internet businesses in China. The Shenzhen Stock Exchange is among a half dozen early customers of the new joint venture, called UMCloud. UCloud CEO and founder Xinhua Ji will lead the joint venture, with headquarter offices in Shanghai, China.

“China and the United States are two countries where cloud computing is developing the fastest, spawning global brands and fostering enormous innovations in technology and business models,” said Alex Freedland, president and co-founder of Mirantis. “UMCloud fully supports and embraces the Internet Plus initiative national policy and we see unlimited potential in OpenStack as a major cloud engine helping power future economic growth in China.”

“As the world’s number one OpenStack pure-play vendor, Mirantis is the open cloud technology leader with deep and rich Openstack deployment success over many years in many different enterprise production environments,” said Xinhua Ji, CEO of UCloud and CEO of the new joint venture with Mirantis, UMCloud. “As the largest independent public cloud service provider in China, UCloud deeply understands customer requirements for cloud computing in China. Our combined strength will allow UMCloud to become the foundational technology provider for China’s Internet Plus Initiative, providing the most reliable, secured, and stable OpenStack-powered cloud service to China enterprises.”

The combination of Mirantis and UCloud in the China market pairs two industry leaders in the world’s second-largest economy, China. Mirantis is the pure-play OpenStack company with a proven history of delivering successful OpenStack implementations to some of the world’s largest cloud customers, including AT&T, Ericsson, Walmart, Wells Fargo and hundreds more. Based in Silicon Valley, the company is one of the top two open source software code contributors to OpenStack and has raised nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in private investment since 2012.

Founded in 2012 by former Tencent executives, UCloud is the number one independent public cloud service provider in China, specializing in hosting and cloud services for clients in various industries such as e-commerce, gaming, mobile internet, and SaaS, among others. With data centers in China, Hong Kong and the United States, UCloud helps its Chinese clients support their operations globally. The company announced a $100 million Series C financing round this spring, with $160 million raised to date.

The China cloud market is vast and growing quickly, driven by government policy and unprecedented consumer and business demand. In 2014, China had more than 640 million internet users — more than the next three countries combined (USA, India and Japan). In 2013, smartphone use in China exceeded 700 million units, and almost 530 million of these Chinese smartphone users accessed the internet from their mobile device. While still nascent, investment in cloud computing infrastructure in China is estimated by consultancy Bain & Company to be growing faster than overall IT spending and projected to reach $20 billion by 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 40% to 45%.

Cloud computing is a national strategic policy and the government included it in the nation’s 12th Five-Year Plan. Last December, the Ministry of Industry and Information (MIIT) officially declared its intention to support OpenStack ecosystems and encourage state-owned enterprises to use OpenStack-based cloud products.

Shenzhen Stock Exchange, one of China’s three main public stock exchanges, is among a half dozen early Mirantis customers deploying OpenStack clouds in China. The Shenzhen Stock Exchange began to explore OpenStack as the instracture for its new planned “Financial Cloud” late in 2014. While the exchange was already providing backend outsourced computing services to many of its customers, the new initiative aimed to drive incremental new revenues.

Other recent Mirantis customer wins in China include Jiesai, a leading Chinese provider of telecommunications hardware and software; Huawei, one of the world’s largest networking equipment providers with 2014 revenues of more than $46.5 billion; and ZTE Corporation, China’s largest listed telecoms equipment company.

By joining forces, Mirantis and UCloud can now demonstrate to customers in China similar success globally in deploying OpenStack clouds in production environments while at the same time bringing invaluable local knowledge and expertise to the implementation of an open cloud infrastructure.

“What we’re building in China is the combination of the best of Silicon Valley, partnering with a China market cloud leader, and assembling a world-class entrepreneurial team to create the next-generation China IT powerhouse,” said Xiaofeng Jin of WestSummit Capital and a UMCloud board member. “China presents the most exciting cloud opportunity for OpenStack adoption in the world and we’re perfectly positioned to lead in this market.”