Solinea, a global provider of open infrastructure solutions for deployment and adoption of production clouds, has closed a US$4 million Series A investment round, led by Translink Capital and including angel investors. A strategic partnership with ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation is also part of the deal, giving Solinea increased reach into the Japanese IT services market for open infrastructure cloud, complementing the company's client bases in North America and Europe.

Proceeds from the Series A will be focused on expanding the company's service delivery capabilities. Additionally, the company will expand its engineering and product management teams as it works toward a Q1 2016 launch of a new product based on the Goldstone project that Solinea open sourced in May of this year. The product is under development and is designed to solve specific problems that enterprises face in the operations of open infrastructure clouds.

The equity investment includes a strategic partnership with Tokyo-based ITOCHU Techno-Solutions, a US$4 billion reseller of IT products and solutions to enterprises and service providers throughout Japan. The investment accelerates the reseller's entry into the open cloud and OpenStack space while leveraging Solinea's expertise in designing, deploying and operating clouds for specific industry segments.

New Wave of Open Infrastructure Startups
Solinea is part of a new wave of open infrastructure startups, focused on delivering a more complete solution set and empowering customers with the training and tooling required for successful operation and maintenance of clouds powered by technologies like OpenStack. Early OpenStack startups were focused either on opinionated software distributions of OpenStack code, or solely on professional services.

OpenStack Summit Tokyo
Solinea is a sponsor of the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo. At booth T59, the company will discuss production deployments in automotive, media and financial services verticals. Additionally, Solinea experts will present in three sessions during the Summit.

Rolling Your Own Images With Packer - In this talk, we will show you how to get up and running with Packer and get your images right from the start.
It's Golden: Best Practice Cloud Operating System Images - This session will review the current challenges and risks facing enterprises adopting OpenStack, Docker, and hybrid solutions; the processes and procedures for planning image creation; and the tools to achieve consistent and manageable results.
Looking Beyond Horizon, Data Visualization of OpenStack Clouds Using D3.js - The OpenStack Horizon dashboard provides a number of built-in visualizations, but how do we move beyond the features provided by Horizon to develop deeper or richer visualizations?
Supporting Quotes
'Clients are telling us about the challenges they face in the design, deployment and daily operations of clouds powered by open infrastructure. Our services, together with the product that we are building, solves those problems, and this Series A enables our ongoing work of servicing our customers and toward GA of that product. Equally important, the strategic partnership with ITOCHU Techno-Solutions brings a proven, enterprise-ready open infrastructure solution to the Japanese market while expanding our support for key North American and European verticals.'
-Francesco Paola, CEO, Solinea

'Customers want platforms that help them efficiently operate their clouds. Most OpenStack clouds today are managed with myriad open source and proprietary tools, cobbled together to provide basic monitoring and alerts. However, this falls far short of what is required for an enterprise environment. We're designing Goldstone as a platform to solve the thorny problems enterprises face, problems that are independent of which distro and set of automation tooling they use.'
-Ken Pepple, CTO, Solinea

'Solinea has demonstrated a compelling mix of services and products that are winning customers in all three major markets for cloud infrastructure: North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. They've proven an ability to design and deploy production clouds at scale, with a product roadmap focused on operations, without locking customers into specific distros or tooling. We're excited about their ability to execute on what we think is a compelling vision for delivering open cloud to customers that need to manage and operate their own infrastructure.'
-Toshi Otani, co-founder and managing director, Translink Capital

'Solinea is an open cloud leader. Their work designing and deploying OpenStack clouds for customers around the world speaks for itself. Together, we will rapidly bring services, training and products to a Japanese market that is ready to embrace open cloud and provide agile infrastructure to their application developers and customers.'
-Tadataka Okubo, CTO, director & managing executive officer, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation

'We're excited to see new companies in our ecosystem closing financing rounds based on business models that embrace open infrastructure powered by OpenStack and leveraging additional open source technologies. Solinea is a valuable participant in our community. They've helped a number of enterprises move into production on OpenStack, and we're expecting more great things from them as they move beyond their Series A.'
-Jonathan Bryce, executive director, OpenStack Foundation

More Solinea News Today
Solinea also today announces, 'Solinea Supports Deutsche Börse to Leverage OpenStack® Technology.' Read more at the Solinea website, www.solinea.com.

About Solinea
Solinea accelerates adoption of open cloud infrastructure through professional services, training offerings and software platforms. The company serves clients who understand that success with agile and open cloud infrastructure depends not only on the technology solution but just as much on process, automation and skills. Led by experts who have designed, deployed and operated production OpenStack clouds at scale for clients worldwide, Solinea is technology agnostic, helping clients select the right platforms and solutions, architected and deployed to suit the unique workloads of the business and agile development strategies. More at www.solinea.com.