Mirantis Broadens OpenStack Training, Certification

Mirantis, focused on the OpenStack cloud computing platform, has expanded its ambitious Mirantis Training for OpenStack course collection with two new courses and a Certificate Verification portal. Mirantis' training platform has been running since 2011, and is differentiated from some other training platforms in that the coursework is OpenStack distribution-agnostic. According to Mirantis, Eighty eight percent of students rate it as better than other professional industry training offerings due to the quality of its instructors, its hands-on format, and its curriculum that is removed of vendor bias.

In an interview with OStatic, Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski emphasized that the number of players in the OpenStack arena to take seriously is narrowing down, and that Mirantis gets an advantage from being purely focused on OpenStack:

"We see only four credible vendors left standing in the OpenStack market: Mirantis, Red Hat, VMware and HP. Our competitive advantage at Mirantis is our pure-play focus. We only do OpenStack. We have no other product or services agenda to upsell, cross-sell or lock-in any customers. This OpenStack only approach lets us provide a better solution for both kinds of customers we serve - the developers that use Mirantis OpenStack and the infrastructure team that has to run it. Unlike our competitors, we are not burdened by other products in our solutions portfolio. We focus on supporting those OpenStack configurations that customers really need, not those that pull other products in our list of offerings."

In fact, Renski is adamant that much of the meaningful consolidation on the OpenStack scene has happened:

"The consolidation has already happened, I predicted it in December 2013. CloudStaling, Metacloud, and eNovance were acquired. Rackspace and StackOps pivoted to focus their business on managed hosting. MorphLabs seem to have gone away altogether. Piston and Nebula are still around, but seem to be in a niche that doesn't directly compete with Mirantis' OpenStack distribution. It is us, Red Hat, VMware and HP...and that's it." 

The OpenStack community reports OpenStack as improving their resumes and as being a highly-valued job skill. Job tracking site Indeed has more than 2,000 career listings that specifically request OpenStack skills and shows that system administrators with OpenStack skills in the U.S. enjoy a $32,000 annual salary premium over their peers. This number will only grow; the BSA Global Cloud Scorecard 2013 predicts an estimated 14 million cloud jobs will be created by 2015.

All of that is behind why Mirantis is expanding its training platform. In addition to its pre-existing OpenStack Bootcamp I (OS100) training for IT professionals, Mirantis now offers OpenStack Fundamentals (OS50), a one-day course for business professionals, and OpenStack Bootcamp II (OS200), a training for students with extensive background in OpenStack. Mirantis Certification is billed as the only vendor-agnostic certification for OpenStack. Mirantis Certified professionals will also now be listed in Mirantis’ new Certificate Verification portal. The portal lets potential employers search for Mirantis Certified professionals and verify their credentials with their certification number.

“Mirantis Training is a powerful engine behind the industry’s adoption of OpenStack,” said Lee Xie, Head of OpenStack Training Services, Mirantis. “We have given more than 5,000 students hands-on experience in standing up and managing an OpenStack environment. Of these, an estimated 30 percent* report successfully deploying OpenStack in their organizations as a result of their training.”