Intel has begun to dive into the world of cloud services, leading a $100 million round of funding in a pure play OpenStack company. This investment into Mirantis will aid in the company’s optimization of its enterprise features and will drive industry adoption. OpenStack cloud software, first introduced in 2010, is built by a team of expert open source contributors under management of OpenStack. Under a relatively small time frame of just five years, OpenStack has become the fifth most popular cloud platform among global companies according to research done by Forrester Research Inc. This round of investment is set to coax adoption of cloud services by allowing it to be both installed and integrated into data centers easier.
Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager at Data Center Group, Intel, has stated, “As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. 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.”
Intel, Goldman Sachs, August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital have all invested in this most recent round of funding. However, Intel appears to be going the extra mile, collaborating with Mirantis on technical features. Intel’s deep technological insight will increase capability of enterprise deployments. The goal of this collaboration is to create thousands of new clouds to serve under Intel’s Clouds for All initiative. This collaboration will address issues such network integration and support for big data.
Alex Freeland, co-founder and president of Mirantis, is excited to exemplify that open design, open development, and open licensing are all important features in the future of cloud infrastructure software. “Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster.”
Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, also gave his opinion on the collaboration: “Obviously, Mirantis is trying to make headway in the OpenStack space. There are a lot of other IT vendors, including IBM and HP, that have all jumped on board as well and there’s a clear commitment to the OpenStack market. In order for the cloud really to take off it requires a collective effort from all the vendors involved. There’s really a who’s who now in the OpenStack space. This is a good commitment from Intel.”
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