An OEM deal with Fujitsu gives Midokura the backing of a big name and a bit of a boost toward building more serious market traction.

The deal, announced Tuesday morning, isn't exactly surprising. Fujitsu was an early investor in Midokura, and last year, they worked to integrate Midokura's MidoNet with Fujitsu's private cloud offering, the ServerView Resource Orchestrator (ROR).

Midokura is fighting “the visibility battle” to get noticed against bigger players in network virtualization, says Ashish Mukharji, director of business development. Midokura hoped to gain some attention by making MidoNet available on an open source basis, as announced in November. The company claims the tactic has at least gained it some proof-of-concept deals.

Today's OEM deal, though, comes with a bonus for the startup: MidoNet will now be the default networking option for ROR. That, in turn, could help Midokura in its bid to become a default OpenStack networking choice in general.

Mukharji notes that Midokura has adopted the tagline, “MidoNet fixes Neutron,” referring to the OpenStack project associated with networking. The point isn't to pick on Neutron; it's more that Neutron wasn't necessarily intended to be a fully enterprise-class offering, he says. So, Midokura offers a MidoNet plug-in for Neutron, an alternative to the default Open vSwitch (OVS) plug-in.

Midokura's hope is that this will create some OpenStack unity. “The reason we open-sourced MidoNet was to promote the use of OpenStack and make it less fragmented,” says Mike Ford, the company's director of service and support.

Midokura faces competition there, though. Last November, on the same day that Midokura opened up MidoNet, startup Akanda announced its own plans to become the OpenStack default for networking. Akanda hasn't been on the scene as long as Midokura but is hoping to gain notoriety for being brought up by the team at DreamHost.