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Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.

Background
Founded in 2011, Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. (Piston) is a commercial OpenStack® private cloud software company based in San Francisco. Piston is the company behind Piston OpenStack™, a turnkey software product that uses advanced systems intelligence to orchestrate an entire private cloud environment using commodity hardware. Piston OpenStack makes it possible for a single system administrator to manage an entire data center, and can be seamlessly scaled, globally, up or down.

History
Piston was established in 2011 by OpenStack founders from NASA and Rackspace.

Piston’s founding team members include former Chief Architect of NASA's Nebula (cloud computing) platform, Joshua McKenty, former Rackspace Cloud Developer, Christopher MacGown, and former NASA Director of Communications, Gretchen Curtis. Piston’s team of engineers includes technical leads from Rackspace, IBM, Apple, Zimbra, and NASA.

On September 27, 2011, Piston delivered Piston OpenStack, then named pentOS, the ﬁrst commercial OpenStack product to market.

On January 18, 2012, Piston announced the general availability of Piston OpenStack, or Piston Enterprise OS as the product was known at the time.

In April 2012, Piston announced it’s first production customer, Radio Free Asia, who began their deployment in December 2011. And over the last two years, dozens of companies, from leading financial services organizations and medical research labs to global service providers and federal government agencies, have deployed Piston OpenStack, at scale, in diverse production environments.

In September 2012, Piston joined the newly formed OpenStack Foundation as a founding Gold Member and holds a position on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors.

Piston’s participation in the OpenStack community also includes leadership roles on OpenStack’s DefCore Interoperability Committee, Governance/Foundation/Transparency Committee , Enterprise Readiness Working Group , and the RefStack project.

In November of 2012, Jim Morrisroe , former General Manager of Zimbra, a subsidiary of VMware, joined Piston as CEO. The official announcement was made in January of 2013, along with news of Piston’s Series B funding round.

On February 26, 2014, Piston released version 3.0 of its flagship solution, Piston OpenStack.

Piston is funded by True Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Swisscom Ventures, Cisco Systems, Inc., Data Collective, and Divergent Ventures.

Turnkey OpenStack Software Product
Piston OpenStack is a software product that uses advanced systems intelligence to orchestrate an entire private cloud environment using commodity hardware. It delivers software-defined storage, compute, networking, and management via Application Programming Interface (APIs) and a self-service web portal. It allows users to increase their data center efficiency through automation, reduce capital and operating costs, and increase agility while maintaining flexibility and freedom of choice.

Product Awards

 * 2013 Best of VMworld 2013 Finalist – Private Cloud Computing Technologies
 * 2013 CODiE Awards Finalist
 * 2013 Piston OpenStack named one of “OpenStack’s Hottest Products Right Now” by Network World
 * 2012 Best of VMworld Winner– Private Cloud Computing Technologies
 * 2012 Under the Radar ‘Best in Show’ Winner, Audience Choice
 * 2012 Under the Radar ‘Infrastructure’ Product Winner, Audience Choice & Judge’s Choice
 * 2012 Cloud Computing World Series Best Cloud Service Finalist

Company Awards

 * 2014 CIO Magazine’s 15 Most Powerful OpenStack Companies List
 * 2014 San Francisco Business Times Forty under 40 Winner – Gretchen Curtis
 * San Francisco Business Times & Silicon Valley Business Journal 2014 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area
 * 2014 Red Herring 100 Finalist
 * 2014 CRN Top 100 Cloud Computing Companies Award
 * 2014 Top 20 Coolest Cloud Platforms and Development Vendors
 * 2014 CIO Magazine’s 15 Most Powerful OpenStack Companies
 * 2013 Business Insider Names Piston one of “25 Enterprise Startups to Bet Your Career On”
 * 2013 AlwaysOn Global 250 Winner
 * 2013 San Francisco Business Times Forty under 40 Winner – Joshua McKenty
 * 2013 VentureBeat CloudBeat Showdown Finalist – Mid-stage category
 * 2013 SD Times Companies to Watch
 * 2012 AlwaysOn Global 250 Winner
 * 2012 CRN Emerging Vendors: The List
 * 2012 AlwaysOn OnDemand 100 Winner
 * 2012 AlwaysOn OnDemand 100 Top Private Companies
 * 2012 Business Insider 50 Most Powerful People in Enterprise Technology – Joshua McKenty
 * 2012 Pixel Award for Website Design
 * 2012 Cloud Times Cloud Companies to Watch: Enterprise OpenStack Pioneer - Piston
 * 2012 CRN 20 Cloud Software Vendors
 * 2012 Business Innovations’ “The Cloud 300”
 * 2011 CRN 10 Hot Emerging Vendors