Mirantis Inc. isn’t afraid to change up its strategy when the situation calls for it. The company started out as an OpenStack consultancy in 2011, went on to become one of the top commercial distributors of the platform and is now moving into the managed services space by acquiring a competitor called TCP Cloud SA.

The Czech firm sells a homegrown OpenStack flavor called Mk.20 that adds several stability improvements to the core project along with a set of value-added automation features. Among them is an updating mechanism that packages new platform releases into Docker instances using Google’s Kubernetes to ease patching. The capability probably wouldn’t merit a second look under normal circumstances, but Mirantis just so happened to enter a partnership with the search giant last month to implement similar functionality in its OpenStack distribution.

Alex Freedland (above), the company’s co-founder and chief executive, told CRN that the purchase of TCP Cloud is set to shave nine months off its release cycle. For comparison, a new version of OpenStack is released every six months or so. And the time savings achieved by the deal are made even more significant by the fact that deploying updates is one of the most tedious maintenance tasks for users of the platform. As a result, automating upgrades could give Mirantis a major advantage over the competition.

Freedland highlighted how his company first stumbled upon MK.20 after TCP lured away a potential client with its superior lifecycle management capabilities, which is quite the feat considering it’s a much lesser-known player in the OpenStack ecosystem. Mirantis plans on integrating the firm’s updating mechanism into its Fuel deployment automation software to deliver upgrades on a managed basis.

As a result, customers will be spared from most of the manual work historically traditionally in the updating process. The company expects the functionality to become available in the first quarter of 2017 as part of the next iteration of its OpenStack distribution.

But while Mirantis is on track to become the first OpenStack with a Kubernetes-based updating mechanism, it can’t expect to enjoy the exclusively for very long. The acquisition of TCP will likely prompt rivals such as Red Hat Inc. to start developing similar functionality for their rivaling distributors if they’re not working on it already.

Mirantis will need to stay on its toes and keep developing new features to maintain its edge, which is exactly what CEO Freedland intends to do. He told LightReading that his company’s endgame is to “become a full service deliverer of infrastructure innovation — everything underneath custom applications.”

Freedland spoke to theCUBE at Mirantis-sponsored OpenStack SV in August *:

Disclosure: TheCUBE, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, was a media partner at OpenStack SV. Neither Mirantis nor other sponsors has editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Image via Pixabay