Mirantis Ramps Up In Europe With German Office, New Hires And OpenStack Engineers

OpenStack player Mirantis is expanding in Europe, with the opening of a new office in Berlin, new channel partnerships and the training of 1,500 OpenStack engineers.

Mirantis’ CEO, Alex Freedland, said: “Europe is a key focus for Mirantis as it grows its global footprint. We have already seen terrific telecom and enterprise sales growth, and plan to significantly increase our footprint in this region in 2016.”

The Berlin, Germany office joins offices in the Netherlands, France, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Mirantis said this spread of influence allows it to capitalise the vendor-agnostic OpenStack landscape in Europe.

The company signed channel partnerships with France’s Alterway, Irelands Ammeon, Holland’s Amazic, and Switzerland’s Apalia.

Differentiate

“European companies are looking for in an increasingly competitive market for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition and drive innovation quickly,” said Mirantis’ new EMEA managing director David Ogden. “Around the core product ‘Mirantis OpenStack,’ which enables the growth and management of a private cloud for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Mirantis provides the total required for the implementation and operation of OpenStack services such as consulting, managed services training.”

The move comes at a key time for OpenStack vendors as they try to validate the open source cloud platform that competes with public cloud from companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.

A survey conducted by OpenStack vendor SUSE earlier this week found that up to 80 percent of IT professionials in the UK either have already moved or are planning to move some of their workloads onto an OpenStack platform.

“This new report clearly demonstrates that UK businesses are keen to adopt private cloud,” said SUSE UK manager Danny Rowark.

“With cost as a primary motivator for UK businesses to move to the cloud, an open source solution can play a key role in enabling organisations to implement a private cloud solution – reducing costs, driving innovation and agility, as well as providing freedom from vendor lock-in.

Mirantis has also made several executive hires in Europe, with David Ogden joining as EMEA managing director and Marque Teegardin starting as senior vice president in worldwide sales.

All of this, claims Mirantis, comes off the back of “record sales” in 2015. Mirantis closed the year with 127 enterprise customers in production deployments across financial, telecommunications, media, and retail sectors. The company also grew its subscription business by 4x.

In August, Mirantis was on the receiving end of $100 million in OpenStack funding, led by Intel. In that $100, $25 million was dedicated to Mirantis from Intel for ‘OpenStack resources’, with Mirantis putting OpenStack resources “upstream” to Intel to help understand and improve its own knowledge of the platform.

“Our outstanding growth is reflective of the huge market opportunity we have in front of us. As AWS continues disrupting the $150 billion dollar cloud infrastructure market, OpenStack will rise up as the only viable open source alternative,” said Mirantis CEO, Alex Freedland.

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