Financial services giant Goldman Sachs is investing in Mirantis as part of a new $100 million funding round led by Intel Capital. That brings total backing for Mountain View, Calif.-based Mirantis, including a $100 million round last year, to about $220 million.
Mirantis started out as systems integrator that took the best OpenStack modules from many vendors to build cloud deployments for customers. More recently it decided to launch its own version of OpenStack, putting it competition with former partners like Red Hat(RHT) . The company, which hopes to go public in 2016, claims OpenStack customers including Comcast, Huawei, Getty Images and, yes, Intel itself.
As part of this latest round, Intel and Mirantis said they will work together to fine-tune enterprise features in OpenStack, a set of technologies for building private or public clouds.
The beauty of OpenStack is that it is collaboratively built and maintained by dozens of tech vendors from AT&T(T) to ZTE. That multi-vendor backing is attractive to businesses that don’t want to lock into any one provider. The downside to all this multi-vendor goodness is the perception that all the different brands of OpenStack won’t work together well.
Jason Waxman, vice president and general manager of Intel’s(INTC) cloud platform group, told Fortune that there is considerable interest in OpenStack but also acknowledged a certain “level of frustration over integration and scalability.” Presumably Intel’s work with Mirantis on enterprise-class OpenStack will help the technology get over that hurdle.
And, if it does not, OpenStack is one of several cloud options. Intel, after all, has close ties with Microsoft which fields its own Azure public cloud and with Amazon, the leader in public cloud infrastructure.
Previous Mirantis backers August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, and Sapphire Ventures (previously SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital, also participated in this round, part of which was disclosed in an SEC filing last week.
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