Mirantis Gets £64m OpenStack Investment From Intel, Goldman Sachs

OpenStack player Mirantis is receiving $100 million (£63.7m) from a group of investors, led by Intel and Goldman Sachs.

The investment is part of Intel’s strategy to increase its presence in the open source community, supporting OpenStack as an alternative cloud computing platform to giants such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

“With Intel as our partner, we’ll show the world that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software, said Mirantis president Alex Freedland.

Naturally, Intel is fishing for more customers for its chip and server businesses. As PC sales decline, Intel is looking to the data centre to boost sales of its own products.

Disruption

“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,” said Freedland.

Intel first ploughed cash into Mirantis in 2013, where the pure-play OpenStack provider received $10 million (£6.4m) to aid its OpenStack distribution plans.

Mirantis has now managed to raise a backing of around $220 million (£140m), helped by a previous $100 million funding last year led by Insight Venture Partners.

Our investment in Mirantis is the next step in bringing open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry as part of Intel’s ‘Cloud for All’ initiative,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president for Intel’s data centre division.

Other existing investors in the $100 million funding include August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

“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.”

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