viernes, 7 de junio de 2013

OpenStack Cloud Builder Mirantis Raises $10M In Second A Round From Red Hat, Ericsson And SAP Ventures

Mirantis has raised another $10 million from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP Ventures to fuel the growing demand for the build out of OpenStack systems for private and public cloud environments. The financing came in a second round of Series A funding.

Mirantis raised $10 million in December from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, and West Summit Capital, which also participated in this current round. Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel said in an email that when Mirantis did the first part of the round, some investors wanted to put in more money.

We didn't want to take it at that valuation (we were profitable and $10m was plenty for us). Instead we agreed to do a future closing at a completely different valuation if we achieve certain business milestones. We delivered and so we got to the second closing.

Mirantis, one of the founding members of OpenStack, has prospered by piecing together the different parts of the compute, storage and network that comprise an OpenStack infrastructure. OpenStack has had seven releases, the latest being Grizzly. Development is done by the community, with different companies offering their own technology as integration pieces for OpenStack.

Red Hat has become one of the power players in OpenStack, so it makes sense they participated in the round. The company recently emerged as the one making the most commits to the OpenStack project.

OpenStack Commits

The skill sets to build out an OpenStack infrastructure are in high demand. SAP, for example, has worked with OpenStack for building out its own infrastructure.

Mirantis has also updated Fuel, its do-it-yourself kit for OpenStack, which developed out of a Mirantis library that consisted of frameworks that integrate different capabilities. For example, Mirantis implemented a Puppet library for automating infrastructure. It previously did not give access to the library.

The new version is available for free under an Apache 2.0 license. It has a visual user interface, a single control plane, new automation features and support for Grizzly, the latest OpenStack release. Later this year, the company plans to release Fuel Enterprise, a commercial-grade distribution of Fuel that will be available to its subscription customers.

Mirantis has become one of the most recognized players in OpenStack. Fuel will be critical to its future, as OpenStack becomes more accessible to the larger market. But in that they will face a growing number of companies offering their own turnkey implementations. Cloudscaling and Piston Cloud are two of the better known startups in the space.

Ionel said the difference is that Fuel doesn't lock the customer into a specific distribution or very narrow hardware and network configuration.

"And we open sourced it," Ionel said.


Mirantis is the leading OpenStack Solutions company focusing on delivering open production-grade clouds free of hooks and proprietary packaging. Mirantis offerings include software, services and education. Mirantis has helped more than 50 customers take advantage of OpenStack. Some notable customers include AT&T, Cisco Webex, Dell, GAP, PayPal. Mirantis is the creator of many exciting technologies around OpenStack, some of which include: FUEL, the open source software program that acts as OpenStack Cloud control plane. Savanna, technology that greatly simplifies using...

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Red Hat, Inc. is a company dedicated to free and open source software, and a major Linux distribution vendor. The company is best known for its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and more recently through the acquisition of open source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss. Red Hat provides operating system platforms along with middleware, applications, and management solutions, as well as support, training, and consulting services.

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Ericsson is the world's leading provider of technology and services to telecom operators. Ericsson is the leader in 2G, 3G and 4G mobile technologies, and provides support for networks with over 2 billion subscribers and has the leading position in managed services. The company's portfolio comprises mobile and fixed network infrastructure, telecom services, software, broadband and multimedia solutions for operators, enterprises and the media industry. The Sony Ericsson and ST-Ericsson joint ventures provide consumers with feature-rich personal mobile devices....

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SAP Ventures helps build industry-leading companies by partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and top-tier venture capital firms. They are information technology investors who focus on enterprise products and services. In the 10 years since it was founded by Hasso Plattner, Chairman and co-Founder of SAP AG, SAP Ventures has invested in over 100 companies. The six person investment team has more than 60 years of combined software experience as operators, entrepreneurs, industry analysts and investors. They have over 35 years of...

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Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, home, mobility, health, consumer Internet, semiconductor manufacturing and cleantech. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$10.8 billion in over 1,276 companies in 54 countries. In that timeframe, 201 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 317 were acquired or participated...

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Cloudscaling is the leader in elastic cloud infrastructure. The company's core product, Open Cloud System (OCS), is the world's most advanced OpenStack cloud infrastructure system. OCS is designed to meet the requirements of next-generation dynamic applications, delivering the agility, performance, and economic benefits of leading cloud providers, but deployable in the customer's data center and under the IT team's control. Customers include Ubisoft, EVault, DataFort, KT, Internap, and LivingSocial. Cloudscaling is backed by Trinity Ventures and headquartered in San Francisco....

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