Intel Injects $100m into Open-Source Cloud Firm Mirantis

Intel has initiated a funding of $100m into open source company Mirantis Inc, joining other blue chips in entering the world of OpenStack. Other investors accompanying Intel Capital included investor Goldman Sachs, August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

OpenStack is an open source cloud-based operating system that launched in 2010 to provide an alternative to public cloud vendors such as Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google’s Cloud Enterprise.

Like many open source architectures, OpenStack is available in free and commercial versions. The program help companies by offering a software dashboard to manage collections of server systems, storage devices, and networking equipment alike.

Mirantis, which sells a subscription version of the OpenStack, has so far raised $220m in funding. Mirantis started out as a program which integrates systems, and took the best OpenStack modules from a wide array of vendors to build cloud deployments for customers. Only recently it launch its own version of OpenStack. The company, which hopes to go public in 2016, has a clientele boasting of high-end customers including Comcast, Huawei, Getty Images and Intel.

In the past, Intel has teamed up with software manufacturers to develop products that could help ignite a spark in the sales of its own technologies. With the company taking a new direction upon the arrival of new technologies, last month the company vowed to make a series of investments under an initiative called ‘Cloud for All’, to help corporate data centers emulate the efficiency of cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The company also is committing additional money to finance future technology development by the Silicon Valley startup.

Diane Bryant, GM of Intel's Data Center Group, said Intel intends to bring "open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry". “As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software”, she was quoted saying.

"OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds”, an Intel executive said.

Intel and Mirantis said they will work together to fine-tune enterprise features in OpenStack. Mirantis is not only competing against major technology companies like IBM, Cisco, HP and Oracle selling OpenStack, it’s also battling against more mature and better funded enterprise technologies from VMware and Microsoft. With this combination of funds and resources, Mirantis hopes to get to a point where large enterprises could deploy OpenStack across the entirety of its infrastructure.