Mirantis, the OpenStack company, just raised another $100 million in funding, led by Intel, just a year after announcing a $100 million raise, the largest Series B financing round in open source history.  That's a lot of money in a short time.  So I spoke to Alex Freedland, president and co-founder of Mirantis, to find out what's going on in this open cloud infrastructure space.

VMblog:  So tell us about your news being announced today.

Alex Freedland:  We're announcing a $100 million strategic technology and investment collaboration by Intel and our other current investors (adding new investor Goldman Sachs) which we believe will more broadly encourage enterprise adoption of OpenStack by making the open source cloud software more robust, easier to use, and faster to deploy.

VMblog:  That's another big investment.  Talk about why VMblog readers should take note.

Freedland:  Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster. Mirantis is the only vendor 100 percent committed to only OpenStack. With Intel as our partner, we'll show the world that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software. Our goal is to make OpenStack the best way to deliver cloud software, surpassing any proprietary solutions.

VMblog:  And why Mirantis?

Freedland:  Intel is dedicated to increasing the accessibility and performance of OpenStack for everyone. It announced the Cloud for All initiative last month to give its customers greater access to cloud technology.  

Mirantis is a key partner in this initiative because of its deep engineering bench and its deep understanding of enterprise pain points and use cases. Many enterprise customers are running Mirantis OpenStack in production deployments at massive scale in multiple industries to create new businesses, lower operating and capital expenditures and improve IT performance and efficiency.

The Intel collaboration follows a record-breaking year for Mirantis. In 2014, it announced the largest Series B round in open source history ($100 million) and announced the largest public sale of OpenStack software ever ($30 million with Ericsson). Top line revenue grew 150 percent year over year and the company added more than 70 new enterprise customers. The company also opened new offices in Amsterdam, Austin, Grenoble, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Enterprise customers are running Mirantis OpenStack in production deployments at massive scale in multiple industries to create new businesses, lower operating and capital expenditures and improve IT performance and efficiency.

VMblog:  And if you don't mind me asking, what are your plans for all that cash?

Freedland:  Mirantis will significantly expand its engineering resources and invest in critical areas to improve OpenStack in production enterprise environments. 

The focus of the Mirantis-Intel collaboration is to make OpenStack a first class citizen when CIOs are making a decision of what technology will drive their software-defined cloud infrastructures. Specifically, some of the investments will focus on the enterprise-readiness features in OpenStack, in areas including networking, storage, and big data. We will also focus on making OpenStack work at scale and ensuring that there are delivery tools to consume it.

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Once again, a special thank you to Alex Freedland, president and co-founder of Mirantis, for speaking with VMblog about the latest round of funding.