Mirantis, a services and systems integration company that has evolved into an OpenStack distribution provider, may be small in size but the company has proven time and again that it isn't afraid to mix things up with the big boys in the cloud playground in which it plays. And now it's going up against Red Hat in an effort to push an open-source certification initiative for products within OpenStack cloud environments.

In recent years, the company has had its fair share of controversy.  At one time, the company came out against VMware's participation in the OpenStack community and publicly expressed concern and skepticism about VMware's joining the foundation.  Later down the road, the company again went after VMware, this time throwing out the claim (which it later walked back) that PayPal was ditching the virtualization giant in favor of migrating to OpenStack.  Even more recently, Mirantis ignited a Twitter storm after blogging that the addition of higher-level services to OpenStack would kill off third-party PaaS implementations.

Fast forward, and the company is once again making bold statements -- and putting its words into action.  According to David Fishman, vice president of marketing at Mirantis, large companies have historically used certifications to build artificial competitive barriers against smaller, disruptive vendors.  As a result, he claims these smaller companies, who may have superior technologies, could find that they're not "certified" to run on the products of larger vendors.  

Instead of relying on vendor-specific certifications, Mirantis is leading the charge for an open-source certification initiative for third-party hardware and software integrations within OpenStack cloud environments.  On the surface, this sounds completely logical and necessary -- and perhaps it is. But it's still not without controversy.

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Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article here.