Mirantis Revenue Surges With Large Enterprise Wins

September 2, 2016 Jeff Ferry

OpenStack Gains In Cloud, Which Companies Will Win?

OpenStack startup Mirantis has seen a surge in revenue in late 2015 and early this year as more enterprise and service provider customers have gone live with OpenStack deployments. The company is now actively planning for a transition to a public company, although CEO Alex Freedland said he was making sure to avoid getting into a situation where the company needed to go public to raise cash. “Our revenue doubled [on a year-over-year basis] in each of the last three quarters,” Freedland told the Daily Cloud. “We are on track to cross a $100 million run rate this year.” Freedland said revenue growth is driven by a number of large customers turning up large installations, such as a major U.S. bank with a 1,000-node installation, a financial information firm, and a major German auto manufacturer. He declined to name the enterprises as many are planning to unveil their OpenStack deployments at the annual OpenStack summit later in April in Austin, Texas. Also, AT&T (NYSE:T) has turned up its OpenStack deployment

But pushing its own cloud platform is still VMware's top priority, analysts say. With partners such as the privately held Mirantis, VMware sells software that helps its customers use OpenStack for building so-called "private" cloud data centers that are accessible by branch offices, clients and others.

Analysts say that most enterprises are interested in a public-private hybrid cloud model — running the most important business apps on their own servers behind a private corporate firewall and accessing public IaaS providers as needed.

"OpenStack is gaining more traction than it had before as the product starts to become more useable," Leong told IBD. "The primary beneficiaries are those that sell (software) distributions, such as Red Hat, HP and Mirantis."