Mirantis Invests in OpenStack Market in Western Europe

Competition surrounding OpenStack in western Europe is heating up. Mirantis has announced the opening of a new facility in France, a move that comes shortly after Red Hat‘s acquisition last week of eNovance, another OpenStack specialist with roots in the same country.

Mirantis already has a strong presence in California and in eastern Europe (specifically, Russia, Ukraine and Poland), as well as an office in the Netherlands. But the new center of operations, which will be based in Grenoble, France, and “will serve as both an R&D center and a training, consulting and support facility,” will help to enhance the company’s operations in western Europe as well.

In a statement regarding the new office, Mirantis cited an interest in helping to serve “the growing number of Mirantis customers in Europe such as Orange, Ericsson, and Pulsant.” The company also hopes to tap into home-grown cloud computing talent in the region. “We see Europe not only as a market but also a source of some of the best technical talent in the world,” Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel said in a statement.

The French office will be led by Patrick Petit, who comes to Mirantis from Bull and before that worked at Sun.

Mirantis hasn’t officially said as much, but the decision to deepen investment in the western European market may be read as a response to Red Hat’s eNovance acquisition. That deal brought the open source computing giant not only a new portfolio of OpenStack deployment resources and expertise, but also an enhanced presence in Paris and Montreal, where eNovance was centered. Mirantis now stands better-positioned to hold its own against Red Hat in the European and francophone worlds.