As it gears up to speed with new strategies, including an open source gambit, Midokura is claiming some progress with deployments in Asia.

The company has landed a deal with CyberAgent (logo above, at right), a web-scale operator that supports mobile games and the popular blogging platform Ameblo, says Adam Johnson, Midokura's vice president of business.

Other deals on the books include an upcoming 2,000-server deployment in China, for a client Johnson declined to name.

Midokura is a smaller name in network virtualization, especially compared with the likes of Alcatel-Lucent (through it subsidiary, Nuage Networks) and VMware (through the 2012 acquisition of Nicira). Its announced customer wins are few, including KVH and, as announced in August, Norweigan service provider Zetta.IO.

The startup's biggest move lately, though, has been to open-source the basics of its MidoNet overlay technology. The hope is that MidoNet can gain enough momentum to be a de facto standard for OpenStack. (Coincidentally, startup Akanda launched simultaneously with Midokura's announcement, targeting the same goal.)

That happened in November, so you wouldn't expect a flood of open source activity around MidoNet just yet. But the project has signed up seven contributors so far, Johnson says.

Midokura does plan to make money, of course, and that's where Enteprise MidoNet comes in. It's the original, full version of MidoNet, with the name changed to emphasize that this is the product you're expected to pay for. (Midokura is not following the Red Hat model, where the product is entirely free and revenues come from service and support.)

Dell signed an agreement in December to start offering Enterprise MidoNet into some OpenStack environments — a pairing that's meant to enhance Dell's partnership with OS vendor Cumulus Networks. That's just getting started; Johnson was in Seattle earlier this week preparing to kick off a road show with Dell.

MidoNet targets OpenStack environments in general, so one target for Enterprise MidoNet is an organization that's planning to wean itself from VMware's vSphere. A plug-in integrates MidoNet to VMware's virtualization environment, leaving the option to unplug that environment and shift to OpenStack over time, Johnson says.

Midokura announced some additions to Enterprise MidoNet today, including support for the OpenStack Juno release and certification for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

Other additions to Enterprise MidoNet include load balancing as a service (LBaaS) for OpenStack Neutron and simpler configuration for BGP gateways.