Mirantis Inc. today announced that co-founder Adrian Ionel, who served as its chief executive officer until 2015, has returned to the helm to lead a new strategy that will focus on emerging growth opportunities in the cloud market.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company frose to prominence as a provider of professional services and automation technology for OpenStack. The open-source platform enables enterprises to build private clouds from commodity hardware that costs considerably less than traditional proprietary gear. It’s used by a fairly limited number of large enterprises of whom many are already Mirantis customers, a situation that has led the company to start looking elsewhere for revenue growth.

Ionel’s return marks a major milestone in the effort. Mirantis is shifting its attention to multicloud environments that are not built exclusively on a single platform such as OpenStack, but rather include several distinct foundational technologies.

As part of the effort, the company has created a platform that makes it possible deploy and manage applications across different types of infrastructure. This includes the public cloud thanks to the integration with Amazon Web Services Inc. that Mirantis introduced in September.

The Mirantis Cloud Platform relies heavily on software containers, which provide the ability to package applications into lightweight packages that can be easily moved between environments. Use of the technology is rapidly growing as enterprises seek to streamline infrastructure and development operations. To court these organizations, Mirantis offers automation features such as the ability to reuse application deployment workflows across cloud deployments. 

The company is facing off against several other providers that offer competing tools for managing containers. As CEO, Ionel will be responsible for a implementing a game plan that can enable Mirantis to stand out from the pack.

Ionel is taking over the reins from Alex Freeland, who assumed the top post after his 2015 departure and will retain a seat on the board.  The returning co-founder has also taken on the role of chairman.

Image: Mirantis