Mirantis and UCloud Launch OpenStack Joint Venture in China

Details: James Barton; Category: Cloud & Virtualisation; 30 October 2015; 4673 views

Mirantis has formed a joint venture with Chinese public cloud provider UCloud to accelerate adoption of OpenStack in China.

The venture, known as UMCloud, is being led by UCloud CEO and founder Xinhua Ji, and will be headquartered in Shanghai. The new company will encourage OpenStack adoption among finance, telecom, state-owned enterprises and large internet businesses in China. It already counts the Shenzhen Stock Exchange among its early customers.

“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. “UMCloud fully supports and embraces the Internet Plus initiative national policy and we see unlimited potential in OpenStack as a major cloud engine helping power future economic growth in China.”

Xinhua Ji, CEO of UCloud and CEO of the new joint venture with Mirantis, UMCloud, said: “Our combined strength will allow UMCloud to become the foundational technology provider for China’s Internet Plus Initiative, providing the most reliable, secured, and stable OpenStack-powered cloud service to China enterprises."

Mirantis is a pure-play OpenStack company with a proven history of delivering successful OpenStack implementations to some of the world’s largest cloud customers, including AT&T and Ericsson. Meanwhile, UCloud is the number one independent public cloud service provider in China, specialising in hosting and cloud services for clients in various industries such as e-commerce, gaming, mobile internet, and SaaS, among others.

The China cloud market is vast and growing quickly, driven by government policy and unprecedented consumer and business demand. In 2014, China had more than 640 million internet users - more than the next three countries combined (USA, India and Japan). In 2013, smartphone use in China exceeded 700 million units, and almost 530 million of these Chinese smartphone users accessed the internet from their mobile device. While still nascent, investment in cloud computing infrastructure in China is estimated by consultancy Bain & Company to be growing faster than overall IT spending and projected to reach $20 billion by 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 40% to 45%.

Cloud computing is a national strategic policy and the government included it in the nation’s 12th Five-Year Plan. Last December, the Ministry of Industry and Information (MIIT) officially declared its intention to support OpenStack ecosystems and encourage state-owned enterprises to use OpenStack-based cloud products.

By joining forces, Mirantis and UCloud can now demonstrate to customers in China similar success globally in deploying OpenStack clouds in production environments while at the same time bringing invaluable local knowledge and expertise to the implementation of an open cloud infrastructure.