Dell, Intel and WestSummit back Mirantis’ OpenStack effort with $10M

Mirantis, the systems integrator pushing vendor-agnostic OpenStack implementations, now has funding from two vendors. Dell, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital are planning to announce Thursday that they are ponying up $ 10 million to help Mirantis build and deploy the best OpenStack clouds for a given company’s needs.

Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel

Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel

Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis, insisted that involvement by Dell and Intel does not neuter the company’s vendor-agnostic pitch and that the investments comes after collaboration with both companies.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company already worked with Intel and Dell on OpenStack projects including Dell’s Crowbar cloud installer, as well as with Cisco on its OpenStack-based Webex implementation and sees no reason that it can’t work with other OpenStack backers going forward. Hewlett Packard, Red Hat, Nebula and other companies are all creating their own take on OpenStack clouds.

WestSummit, based in China, is also an important strategic backer.  ”China and the Asia-Pacific region is huge on OpenStack  – and WestSummit can help us enter that market which, given the cultural peculiarities, is hard to penetrate without local connections,” Ionel said.

While Intel and WestSummit will get board seats, Dell will not. “We have a strategic relationship with them but nevertheless we remain vendor independent so we can work with the broadest ecosystem of partners,” Ionel said.

This is not a typical Series A round, he added. “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,” said Boris Rensky, Mirantis’ executive VP and co founder.


GigaOM