OpenStack solutions provider Morphlabs today announced the finalization of $10 million in Series D funding to expand its market share in Asia by means of an OpenStack training program and a partnership with NEC. Led by Tallwood Management, Entropy Research Lab and existing investor G2iG, the round brings the total capital raised by Morphlabs to $22.5 million. Morphlabs delivers an OpenStack-based mCloud solution for enterprise and cloud service providers. According to a report in Data Center Knowledge, Morphlabs is targeting telcos in Asian countries that need assistance setting up an OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure based on its mCloud solution. The Morphlabs training sessions will be held in Manila, Jakarta, Singapore, Cebu and Hong Kong over the next three months. The first training session in Manila on September 17 will be followed by an OpenStack hackathon wherein the winning team will receive an invitation to the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong through the sponsorship of Morphlabs and NEC. The training sessions in Asia are suggestive of significant interest in OpenStack amongst the Asian enterprise community. Last month, for example, NEC announced a partnership with Morphlabs to power mCloud using NEC Express 5800 servers.
Despite all of the interest in OpenStack in Asia, the Morphlabs training sessions also underscore the way in which vendors are dealing with challenges faced by customers in using OpenStack solutions. Piston Cloud, for example, recently announced OpenStack 101 to introduce interested parties to the core components of OpenStack within a 3 hour training session. Word amongst OpenStack users is that the platform’s deployment and operation has yet to be sufficiently simplified such that it can be easily managed by IT administrators, particularly at an enterprise-level, and hence the need for specialized training and customer support at this stage of the product’s evolution.
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