On Thursday, Mirantis, the Mountain View, CA-based consulting company that specializes in OpenStack deployments, announced the finalization of $10 million in funding from Intel, Dell and WestSummit Capital. The funding is intended to enhance Mirantis’s ability to expand its services by increasing the number of developers dedicated to OpenStack and expanding its abilty to deliver more OpenStack deployment and training services. Mirantis currently offers four sets of OpenStack services:
•Do it Yourself, Assisted OpenStack deployment featuring:
-Assessment of an organization’s business and technical requirements for OpenStack implementation.
-Reference Architecture in the form of a customized elaboration of the architectural specifics of an OpenStack deployment for an organization’s use case, including details of the required OpenStack modules, hardware requirements and recommendations for automation.
-Training
-Deployment Support
Mirantis’s Do it Yourself, OpenStack deployment assistance features a bundle of services offered at a fixed price.
•OpenStack deployments for Service providers
•OpenStack deployments for enterprise private-clouds
•Cloud migrations from proprietary vendors such as Amazon Web Services and VMware to OpenStack
Boris Rensky, Mirantis’ executive VP and co-founder, remarked on the significance of the funding round by noting:
We’ve had a good run doing things ourselves, we have 300 employees and 30 projects, but OpenStack has gotten too big for us to keep making meaningful progress without financing and strong strategic partnerships.
According to a report in GigaOM, Intel and WestSummit will obtain seats on the Mirantis board, although Dell will not. Mirantis is currently in the process of helping Intel build out its private cloud. Meanwhile, WestSummit represents an important investor because it boasts a headquarters in Beijing and may facilitate the acquisition of OpenStack customers in China. Rensky noted that recent OpenStack conferences in Beijing and Shanghai attracted 1000 and 700 developers, respectively, and thereby compares favorably with U.S. OpenStack conferences such as the October 15-18, 2012 San Diego conference which attracted 1300 developers.
The investment constitutes yet another affirmation of the commercial interest in OpenStack, and specifically, the value in the marketplace of a vendor dedicated to vendor-agnostic, OpenStack deployments in the vein of Mirantis. Mirantis claims no allegiances to any of the other commercial purveyors of OpenStack, for example, Dell included. The market should expect to see other dedicated OpenStack deployment firms opening up as the number of OpenStack deployments proliferates and more and more enterprises express willingness to venture an OpenStack pilot project or two. Mirantis’s services are unique in the industry and one would expect that other consulting firms will soon jump on the OpenStack deployment bandwagon by similarly touting vendor agnosticism and a productized approach to installation.
Cloud Computing Today 