OpenStack vendor Mirantis is back with another $100 million round of funding, with Intel leading the charge.
It was only 10 months ago that Mirantis announced a $100 million round and the company now has an identical announcement. Intel Capital is leading the new round of investment, while a new partnership between Mirantis and Intel aims to boost OpenStack adoption in the enterprise market.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, OpenStack made its debut back in 2010 as an open source cloud operating system (OS), aiming to offer an alternative to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and other such proprietary public cloud infrastructure vendors. A slew of startups joined the OpenStack project, but many of them either disappeared, or sold their business to larger companies. Mirantis managed to keep its head above the water so far and its new collaboration with Intel now heralds a promising future.
The funds consist of a mix of spending and equity, and other companies who joined the party include bigwigs such as Goldman Sachs, August Capital, Ericsson, Insight Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures and WestSummit Capital.
The OpenStack ecosystem hit two major milestones in recent weeks: a new partnership with Rackspace for an OpenStack Innovation Center, and a co-development partnership with Mirantis for pouring another $100 million into OpenStack engineering, gunning for "enterprise readiness at scale."
Intel is starting to dedicate notable resources to boosting the OpenStack ecosystem and the latest deal with Mirantis proves its commitment to the platform.
"By making OpenStack an integral part of the "Cloud for All" initiative, Intel (which owns 90+ percent of the server market worldwide) sends a strong message to enterprise buyers that OpenStack and Intel-based commodity hardware will constitute a natural union," Mirantis further explains in a new company blog post.
With the latest $100 round, Mirantis reaches a total of $220 million raised across all rounds.
As promising as it sounds, however, it's worth taking into account that Mirantis has some big competition from heavyweight companies such as Cisco, IBM, HP and Oracle, all of which sell OpenStack, as well as other enterprise technologies from Microsoft and VMware.
