Mirantis wins OpenStack cloud contract with Volkswagen

Mirantis has won a massive customer in the form of Volkswagen, as the car maker looks to OpenStack to power its next generation private cloud.

Mirantis competed against other OpenStack vendors, including Red Hat, as Volkswagen ran a “comprehensive and rigorous” selection process. Mirantis came out on top, with VW planning to use Mirantis’ OpenStack distribution to power clouds and applications across all of its business groups.

“As the automotive industry shifts to the service economy, Volkswagen is poised for agile software innovation. The team at Mirantis gives us a robust, hardened distribution, deep technical expertise, a commitment to the OpenStack community, and the ability to drive cloud transformation at Volkswagen,” said Mario Müller, Volkswagen vice president IT Infrastructure.

Volkswagen said that Mirantis demonstrated an almost perfect execution rate across 64 various use cases, and emerged as the “most stable and fastest” to implement among industry OpenStack distributions.

Regional director for Mirantis, Sebastian Weiss, said: “Germany is the economic powerhouse of Europe, and Volkswagen is its champion. The world will be watching as they use OpenStack to accelerate existing business functions, and to on-ramp new technologies, business ideas and models like IoT, machine learning and big data analytics.”

The win comes as Mirantis ramps up its European operations in 2016. The company opened a new office in Berlin in February, and announced new channel partnerships alongside 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 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 has signed channel partnerships with France’s Alterway, Ireland’s Ammeon, Holland’s Amazic and Switzerland’s Apalia.

Antony Savvas

York, UK-based Antony Savvas has been a technology journalist for 25 years and has expertise in all major areas of enterprise and consumer IT. He has worked for a number of leading technology magazines and websites and his work is syndicated across the internet. He also undertakes corporate work for some of the world's leading technology companies.