Intel Logo
An employee walks past an Intel logo during the 2014 Computex exhibition at the TWTC Nangang exhibition hall in Taipei June 3, 2014. Reuters/Pichi Chuang

Chip giant Intel has entered into a financial and technology coalition with OpenStack firm Mirantis. As part of the collaboration, Intel Capital has invested $100 million along with new investor Goldman Sachs.

Mirantis announced a strategic technology and investment association with Intel through a press release . The deal, which includes a $100m investment in Mirantis from Intel Capital, will provide technical alliance between the two companies. The investment will significantly strengthen the open-source cloud project by introducing more enterprise features, services and support for customers.

Mirantis said that the funding will also bring Goldman Sachs on board, as an investor for the first time. Other existing investors include August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

Intel’s recent efforts on creating new clouds resulted in the technical collaboration. The two companies will focus on addressing technology challenges like performance at scale, storage, network integration and support for big data. This in turn will expand the use of OpenStack and ease adoption for Mirantis and Intel customers.

“Our investment in Mirantis is the next step in bringing open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry as part of Intel’s ‘Cloud for All’ initiative,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, Intel in the press release. Alex Freedland, co-founder and president of Mirantis opined in the press note, “With Intel as our partner, we’ll show the world that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software.”

OpenStack is an open-source project, introduced in 2010 by Rackspace and NASA to create components for building public and private clouds on standard hardware. It is now supported by more than 200 vendors, including Cisco, Dell, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware, reports ZDNet . OpenStack has quickly emerged as the fifth most popular cloud platform embraced by Global 2000 enterprises, says a report by Forrester.

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