Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.

Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. was a San Francisco software company that built commercial, enterprise-grade products on the OpenStack open-source cloud platform. Its software let organizations deploy and operate large-scale distributed systems and private cloud infrastructure in their own data centers, automating orchestration and deployment of the underlying infrastructure so that development teams could stand up new services, frameworks and orchestration tools on commodity hardware without extensive infrastructure work.

The company was founded in 2011 by people who had worked on the technical teams at NASA and Rackspace and helped create the OpenStack project in 2010. CEO Joshua McKenty had been cloud architect of NASA's Nebula cloud infrastructure, a precursor of OpenStack's cloud computing component, and held an appointed seat on the OpenStack Policy Board; CTO Christopher MacGown had been a technical lead at SliceHost, which Rackspace acquired in 2008. Chief Marketing Officer Gretchen Curtis was also a co-founder.

Piston's product line reached an OpenStack 3.5 release in June 2014, which added security features and a total-cost-of-ownership calculation tool. Cisco acquired the company on June 12, 2015, folding its distributed-systems and automated-deployment expertise into the Cisco Intercloud strategy and the OpenStack foundations of Cisco Intercloud Services and Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud. Cisco subsequently issued an end-of-support / end-of-life notice for Piston Cloud Computing products.

Founding story

Co-founders Christopher MacGown, Joshua McKenty and Gretchen Curtis started the company in 2011, working out of the Victorian apartment shared by MacGown and McKenty; MacGown and McKenty came from the technical teams at Rackspace and NASA respectively and had helped create OpenStack in 2010.

Business model

Piston licensed enterprise-grade software to organizations that wanted to run and automate private cloud infrastructure in their own data centers, selling directly to enterprise IT and development teams rather than operating the infrastructure itself.

Traction

By 2014 Piston employed roughly 50 people and counted the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Swisscom, Qualcomm, Zulily and King Digital Entertainment among the organizations using its software to automate private cloud infrastructure.

Latest developments

Cisco announced the acquisition in June 2015 and completed it on June 12, 2015, positioning Piston's technology and team within its Intercloud strategy; Cisco later published an end-of-support and end-of-life notice for Piston Cloud Computing products while directing existing Piston customers to their prior sales and support contacts.