Intel, Ericsson bet $100m on Mirantis and OpenStack

Mirantis delivers OpenStack cloud and open source application infrastructure.

OpenStack is available in free and commercial versions in an arrangement that helps customers avoid being locked into one vendor.

OpenStack operates as a data center operating system that offers a software dashboard, which customers use to manage storage devices as well as networking equipment.

In 2012, OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity was established to promote the software. Intel Capital led the round, and now Mirantis will be collaborating with Intel to increase enterprise adoption of OpenStack.

Against this backdrop, Mirantis remains standing and it’s hoping that working closely with Intel, along with the huge infusion of money, will help it advance OpenStack in the enterprise.

Existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures and WestSummit Capital also participated in the investment, which consists of equity and spending. For some of these firms, except Goldman Sachs, this is not the first investment into Mirantis. Up to date, Mirantis has raised a total of $220 million to grow the scope of its cloud platform.

While OpenStack has obviously made a lot of progress in a short period of time, the number of IT organizations that have the engineering resources needed to master it in its current form is clearly limited. The industry has been slow to adopt OpenStack, and is still miles away from the top place. A year later, the company expanded to offer cloud based services, and ever since then it has grown its workforce from 150 to around 750 staff members.

The software, which competes with offerings from Microsoft and VMware Inc.

The other goal of the collaboration and investment is to even up the odds between the on-premise infrastructures and hyper-scalers Amazon and Google. Global Business Machines Corp. As TechCrunch pointed out, many have recently been acquired by larger companies: Cisco snatched Metacloud and Piston, IBM bought Blue Box, and EMC picked up Cloudscaling. Intel has plans to help Mirantis raise that to 1,000 servers.

Intel has already started the initiative through a new partnership with Rackspace, by establishing the OpenStack Innovation Center. There are many milestones that these two companies could accomplish if they join hands. “Intel wants to position itself as a leader in the cloud”. The chipmaker invested $740 million in the partnership. Mirantis has proved its potential to the world, the reason external investors seem to be so keen to invest in the company.

Many tech giants are making similar investments in cloud computing, seeing that the days of enterprise mainframes are disappearing.