Mirantis and UCloud Partner on OpenStack Cloud in China

Mirantis hopes to drive open source cloud computing forward in China through a partnership with UCloud, an independent Chinese cloud computing company. The collaboration will focus on increasing OpenStack adoption in the Chinese market.

By collaborating with UCloud, Mirantis hopes to secure its piece of what Mirantis executives perceive as the coming cloud bonanza in China. “China and the United States are two countries where cloud computing is developing the fastest-spawning global brands and fostering enormous innovations in technology and business models,” said Alex Freedland, president and co-founder of Mirantis, in regard to the UCloud partnership.

In announcing the news, Mirantis also noted that China had 640 million Internet users as of 2014, as well as a quickly expanding smartphone market. Both of these factors are helping to drive demand for cloud services in China.

So far, Mirantis and UCloud have revealed few details of exactly how they will collaborate. But the partnership presumably will center on deploying Mirantis’s OpenStack distribution as the basis for cloud services and products offered by UCloud. Mirantis pitches itself as the only “pure-play” OpenStack vendor, meaning its OpenStack distribution is built to be fully open and platform-agnostic.

Mirantis reports that it already has a half-dozen customers in China, among them the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Jiesai, Huawei and ZTE Corp.

As relatively young and well-funded companies, Mirantis and UCloud make a good match. Mirantis has broken records for its success in raising investment funds, while UCloud announced $50 million of funding last year.