Mirantis, the largest OpenStack systems integrator, today announced that Ericsson, Red Hat, and SAP Ventures, along with existing investor WestSummit Capital, have invested $10 million in the second round of Series A financing for Mirantis since December, bringing the total capital raised by the company to $20 million. Mirantis previously raised $10 million in December 2012 from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, and WestSummit Capital.

OpenStack is quickly gaining momentum among enterprise IT customers. Mirantis offers software and services for customers to deploy and run production-grade OpenStack clouds.  

Investment proceeds will be used to solidify Mirantis' leading position in the OpenStack market by enhancing the engineering roadmap for Fuel, its tool for management and deployment of OpenStack clouds, and driving integration with technology and products from Mirantis' partners.

"The investment by Ericsson, Red Hat, and SAP Ventures is about more than capital," explained Adrian Ionel, Mirantis president and CEO. "It's about the integration of Mirantis' Fuel technology and services with key players in IT."

In addition to today's funding announcement, Mirantis announced a major update to Fuel. The new version offers a visual, intuitive interface as a single control plane for OpenStack clusters and enables automated hardware discovery and network verification. It also supports the latest Grizzly OpenStack release and is available for download today from the Mirantis website. To date, Mirantis' Fuel tools have been free and are open source under Apache 2.0 license. Later this year, the company plans to release Fuel Enterprise, the commercial grade distribution of Fuel that will be available exclusively to its subscription customers.

"Because Fuel is open source and easy to modify, experienced cloud operators can get maximum flexibility in their OpenStack deployment," said Roman Alekseenkov, Mirantis' director of Product and Community. "With this latest update and Fuel Enterprise, we aim to complement this flexibility with ease-of-use for the daily operation of OpenStack clouds."

Ericsson, a world-leading provider of communications technology and services, will use OpenStack to move systems and applications to an open cloud platform. Mirantis' Fuel technology and services are expected to play a key role in this initiative.

"OpenStack is key to our technology roadmap. Like Mirantis, we are focused on building very robust, mission-critical solutions that meet service provider needs. Mirantis offers the ideal combination of technology, engineering talent, and competence to help us accelerate our OpenStack development," said Paolo Colella, vice president and head of Consulting and Systems Integration at Ericsson.

Red Hat, the leading open source solutions provider, is the largest contributor to OpenStack and is readying its enterprise-class Red Hat OpenStack distribution.

"Red Hat is taking a leadership role in bringing OpenStack to enterprise users, and Mirantis has been an early leader in developing services and tools that are helping enterprise customers achieve success with OpenStack," declared Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO and vice president of Worldwide Engineering. "Our investment in Mirantis reflects our commitment to customer success and customer choice, and the on-going collaboration between Red Hat and Mirantis will help accelerate the adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise."

Enterprise software giant SAP is investing heavily in cloud technology. Mirantis has already built an OpenStack cloud for SAP using Fuel and the companies will explore further use of OpenStack by SAP.

"An early leader in promoting and supporting the adoption of OpenStack, Mirantis is poised for continued growth as it aims to help companies around the world build open cloud platforms on an agile, future-proof infrastructure," said Jai Das, managing director at SAP Ventures. "SAP Ventures looks forward to continuing its long-standing support of companies based on open-source technologies and is pleased to support Mirantis' growth and expansion as it is the clear leader in the OpenStack tools and services market."