Cisco announced today that it is acquiring privately-held firm Piston Cloud computing. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.
Piston Cloud was founded by former NASA staffers, including Joshua McKenty, Christopher MacGown and Gretchen Curtis, after the OpenStack platform was first announced back in 2010. OpenStack was originally a joint effort of NASA and Rackspace and has since expanded to include the support of many of the world’s major IT vendors.
“Piston’s technology and our expertise in accelerating the provisioning, deployment and automated management of large-scale distributed systems will complement Cisco’s ambitious Intercloud strategy,” Piston co-founder Christopher MacGown wrote in a blog post.
Piston as a company has recently undergone significant changes. Former CEO and co-founder Joshua McKenty left the company in September to go work for VMware. From a product perspective, Piston also recently shifted its focus away from being an OpenStack pure-play vendor.
In April, Piston rebranded its core platform as CloudOS, away from the previous name of Piston OpenStack.
“The CloudOS 4.0 release is an expansion of our core technology, to support workloads other than OpenStack,” Christopher MacGown, co-founder and CTO of Piston, said at the time.
Piston now joins Metacloud, which was acquired by Cisco in 2014 as part of Cisco’s Cloud Services organization.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
