OpenStack Firm Mirantis announce $100 Million Intel Investment

OpenStack is available in free and commercial versions in an arrangement that helps customers avoid being locked into one vendor. It is venture-backed by August Capital, Ericsson, Intel Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures and WestSummit Capital. It has even promised additional funds for future developments and technologies.

The OpenStack platform was developed by companies including Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat and Rackspace, to compete against cloud-computing provided by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. It is expected that the investment will benefit clients to create an intelligent cloud based infrastructure where they can manage storage, server systems, and other networking equipment. Intel may be planning to help the company develop OpenStack for the enterprise sector.

A mixture of private equity and investment firms are part of the latest investment round, which is yet to be announced. So OpenStack is becoming a first-class citizen when those CIO decisions are getting made – and it’s happening faster because cloud adoption is not going to wait.

As part of that effort Mirantis plans to help refine all the components of OpenStack in a series of stages that will ultimately enable IT organizations to fire up as many as 2,000 OpenStack nodes right out of the box. Cisco acquired Piston and Metacloud. Intel expressed concerns the existing OpenStack installations were too complex for the mass market, and says “the industry can do better”. EMC, a tech giant that specializes in storing data, has for years owned a company called VMware, which makes software that is integral to cloud computing technology; now both EMC and VMware have invested in Pivotal Software, which works on cloud products.

Many longtime Intel partners like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM also make this kind of software, which has the advantage of being open source and thus adaptable to other cloud systems. Intel is doing more than offering cash, though. All that activity has left the fate of Mirantis in question, but now it’s clear that investors believe in the prospects of the company.

The competition between OpenStack and its rival platforms explains why Intel and Mirantis are collaborating over the issue of enterprise functionality.

Intel has also invested a reported $700 million in Cloudera, a startup focused on data analysis. Given that most of the computers operate on Intel processors, the company can book a suite in the next generation of cloud-based services for enterprise, if the cards are played right.