Mirantis' Vendor-Agnostic Certification Program for OpenStack Gains Momentum as Open Source Cloud Adoption Accelerates

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 12, 2014) - Mirantis, the number one pure-play OpenStack company, today announced that more than 200 companies and organizations around the world had turned to the Mirantis Training and Certification program for OpenStack to train and certify their IT staff as OpenStack cloud operators on the platform of their choice.

Mirantis' Certification for OpenStack (MCA-100) is unique in that it certifies infrastructure professionals on their capabilities to deploy and operate vendor-agnostic OpenStack environments not tied to a particular OpenStack distribution. Professionals awarded the certification are able to configure an OpenStack environment that spans various host operating systems (RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS), virtualization technologies (KVM, vSphere), storage back-ends (Ceph, NetApp, EMC) and network topologies.

"I found the MCA-100 exam compared favorably to rigorous certifications like VCP and CISSP," said Ramiro Salas, a technology specialist at VMWare who recently completed his MCA-100 certification. "The technological independence that Mirantis professes is accurately reflected on the exam and I highly recommend the course."

Enterprises benefiting from Mirantis' training and certification for OpenStack are leaders in diverse industries including telecommunications, technology, financial services, consulting and retail and include companies like Accenture, AT&T, Booz Allen, British Telecom, Charles Schwab, Expedia, Orange, SAP and JP Morgan.

"The MCA-100 was a challenging exam covering a wide spectrum of technologies ranging from individual OpenStack components to deployment and operations," said Steven Sonnenberg, Solution Consultant at Hitachi Data Systems. "To prepare I used the material provided by Mirantis, along with their own branded OpenStack documentation. I also attended the Mirantis Bootcamp training from which I highly benefitted and which I strongly recommend for general OpenStack training."

Certification exams are offered at any one of 700 Kryterion locations in over 100 countries. Krytrion has been a world leader in test development and delivery since 2001. In addition, professionals can be certified at home or at work using Kryterion online proctoring methodology.

Prior to taking the certification exam, individuals may gain more confidence with OpenStack through Mirantis' onsite OpenStack Bootcamp courses (with both two and three day options available), but taking the Mirantis course is not a pre-requisite for enrollment in the certification exam.

Mirantis takes a unique approach to training, emphasizing a hands-on, problem solving methodology. Nearly three-quarters of the training provided by Mirantis is hands-on with the explicit goal of giving engineers the power to stand up OpenStack distributions from scratch. The hands-on emphasis of Mirantis OpenStack training is supplemented by select classroom instruction sessions aimed at helping trainees understand the conceptual underpinnings of OpenStack deployment.

In the months of March and April 2014 alone, Mirantis will offer more than 25 local training courses in Austin, London, New York and San Jose.

About Mirantis
Mirantis is the number one pure-play OpenStack company. Mirantis delivers all the software, services, training and support needed for running OpenStack. More customers rely on Mirantis than any other company to get to production deployment of OpenStack at scale. Among the top five companies worldwide in contributing open source software to OpenStack, Mirantis has helped build and deploy some of the largest OpenStack clouds at companies such as AT&T, Cisco WebEx, Comcast, Dell, The Gap, NASA, NTT Docomo, PayPal, Red Hat, Sprint and Verizon. Mirantis is venture-backed by Dell, Intel, Red Hat, SAP and WestSummit Capital. For more information, visit www.mirantis.com or follow us on Twitter at @mirantisit.