Guest: Alex Freedland (LinkedIn)
Company: Mirantis (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Alex Freedland will be taking the helm as CEO of Mirantis at a time when organizations are looking at taming cloud complexity and the open source development model has almost become an industry standard.

The complexity of Kubernetes continues to be a pain point for developers but it is no different to any other technology that is rapidly being developed. Traditionally, complexity has been abstracted away by vendors creating a proprietary stack that is productized: however, the stack itself can become complex and expensive. Services is another way that complexity is abstracted away with the company who is delivering the services also managing them. Mirantis took the path of abstracting complexity through a managed service with ZeroOps.

When the container wave began, OpenStack and Red Hat were there at the forefront of the movement, and being a small startup, Mirantis was focusing on building its own ecosystem and co-founding the foundation. However, with the acquisition of Docker Enterprise, Mirantis became one of the largest container vendors in production. This has enabled them to grow their existing customers and build value for them but also to use their resources and expertise to develop the right solutions for their customers.

While other large players are making use of consolidation acquisitions to strengthen their stacks and make them more closed, Mirantis is instead working horizontally to curate the pieces that are right and work together without any lock-in. For large customers who have high spending with incumbents, this can be an attractive value proposition.

Forming strong partnerships is a core part of Mirantis’ ethos and this is demonstrated by the company’s investment in Lens. It was developed from the beginning with the ability to integrate components, similar to Apple’s App Store, to function as an entryway into the Kubernetes ecosystem. Not only does it bring new partners and use cases into the ecosystem which customers can use but the vendors can also use it as a channel to market and into the customers.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.