Intel Expands Cloud Efforts with Mirantis Collaboration, Investment

OpenStack company Mirantis opines that a technological and financial alliance with Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) that includes an investment of $100m will greatly boost the open-source cloud project by accelerating the introduction of additional enterprise features.

The software, which competes with offerings from Microsoft and VMware Inc., has been making slow progress since it was introduced in 2010 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Rackspace Hosting Inc., a provider of cloud computing services. Including the latest round, the company has received a total capital of $195 million till now.

Collaboration with other companies will also be a key for Intel to succeed in its new commitment.

“Our investment in Mirantis is the next step in bringing open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry as part of Intel’s “Cloud for All” initiative”, said Diane Bryant, senior vice president for Intel’s data centre division.

As per Forrester, a consultancy for technology research, OpenStack has become the fifth most popular cloud platform among Global 2000 enterprises. According to him, though many organizations are using OpenStack in production enviroments today, doing so requires they have a large team of IT experts on hand to deploy and maintain it.

As part of this, Intel has pledged to support Mirantis in tackling some common areas of technical difficulty OpenStack users often come up against with regard to storage, networking, integration and getting their deployments to perform well at scale.

Freedland, said: “If Amazon wins this and gets an oligopoly, the whole innovative IT community of infrastructure application folks will die”.

“The trillion-dollar question is: Where will the enterprise workloads run and who will own the cloud?” noted Mirantis co-founder and president of Alex Freedland in an August . 23 blog post.

The funding round looks to capitalise on this by introducing tools that will make Mirantis’s take on OpenStack easier to deploy and integrate with existing enterprise datacentre technologies.

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is back with another $100 million round of funding, with Intel leading the charge.

“As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software”, she continued. Top line revenue grew 150 percent year-over-year and the company added more than 70 new enterprise customers.