Former CEO and co-founder Alex Freedland is returning to Mirantis as CEO, while Adrian Ionel is stepping down effective January 11. He will transition to serve as an advisor to the company.

An open source pioneer, Freedland championed Mirantis’ early investment in enterprise open-source, helping to win a portfolio of some of the world’s most demanding deployments across a diverse collection of customers. He was a co-founder and the chairman of the finance committee of the OpenInfra Foundation and was named by Business Insider as one of the 39 Most Important People in Cloud Computing.

“Once again, we are in the middle of one of the most exciting periods in the history of computing, more than ever led by open source innovation. Mirantis will continue to apply our experience of bringing together the best of open source and harnessing it into secure, reliable, and scalable solutions that our customers demand to stay ahead of their competition,” said Freedland. “The company’s unique combination of innovation DNA, flexibility, and operational expertise sets it apart in the competitive landscape.”

Ionel, also a co-founder, played an instrumental role in building Mirantis into a prominent force in the industry. As CEO, Ionel led the acquisitions of Docker Enterprise, amazee.io, Shipa, and the assets of Kontena (Lens). Under Ionel’s tenure, Mirantis achieved sustained profitability and successfully established itself as a leading company in cloud-native infrastructure.

Mirantis acquired Docker Enterprise in 2019 and immediately integrated the technology into its Kubernetes platform.