Cisco Has Acquired Piston Cloud Computing

Cisco Has Acquired Piston Cloud Computing

Advancing Cisco's Intercloud Strategy.

On June 12, 2015 Cisco acquired Piston Cloud Computing, a privately held San Francisco based Openstack product company.  Piston provides software that enables streamlined operational deployment of large scale distributed systems.   Piston's enterprise grade software helps customers automate orchestration and deployment of underlying distributed systems for running applications on OpenStack.

Cloud computing has dramatically changed the IT landscape. To enable greater business agility and help lower costs, organizations are shifting from a primarily on-premise IT structure to hybrid IT: a mix of private cloud, public cloud, and on-premise applications.

Cisco addresses the changing needs of its enterprise and service provider customers through its Intercloud strategy. Intercloud is an open solution that brings together organizations' private clouds, major public clouds, and Cisco and partner clouds, and enables movement of workloads across heterogeneous environments.

M&A and investments are an important part of our build, buy, partner and integrate strategy. This acquisition advances our Intercloud strategy and supports our leadership in cloud services, to provide best-in-class solutions for our customers.

 

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Q: Why is Cisco acquiring an OpenStack company like Piston now?
A: OpenStack and Open Source are core components to our Intercloud strategy. It serves as the underlying platform for Cisco Intercloud Services, and for the former Metacloud product now known as Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud. The experience and talent Piston brings to this space will complement our existing teams and prior acquisitions to continue to rapidly deliver on our vision and roadmap for customers and partners. Specifically, Piston will help enhance the operational capabilities of the foundational OpenStack components of Intercloud.
Q: What is OpenStack?
A: OpenStack is a free and open-source cloud computing software platform. Users primarily deploy it as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center — which users manage through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API. OpenStack.org released it under the terms of the Apache License.
 
OpenStack began in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace Hosting and NASA. Currently, it is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. More than 200 companies have joined the project. Cisco is a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation and maintains an active seat on the board of directors of the foundation.
Q: What is Cisco's Intercloud strategy?
A: The Intercloud is a globally connected network of clouds from Cisco and our partners. It has been designed to address customer requirements for a global, highly secure cloud platform that meets the robust demands of the Internet of Everything.
 
Cloud the Way You Need It. The Intercloud customer value proposition is: Choice of consumption models from hundreds of providers for thousands of services; and choice of cloud architectures for customers and cloud providers. Cisco's partner-centric approach maximizes customer cloud workload flexibility.
 
Manage Risk Locally and Globally: Customers have the flexibility to manage Compliance and risk mitigation, local and global data privacy and control and alignment with industry regulations.
 
Across Services, In Every Location: Control provides consistent, application-level security and policy, assured application performance, and a uniform user experience across clouds.

Piston Customers:
If you are an existing customer or partner of Piston and have questions about your product or service, please continue to contact your existing Piston sales representative.

Cisco Customers:
If you are an existing customer or partner of Cisco and have questions about your product or services, please continue to contact your existing Cisco sales representative.

Piston Cloud Computing End of Support / End of Life Notice

 

Piston Cloud Computing customers should continue to use the existing process for support on installed Piston products. Cisco will notify you in advance of any change to the support process.

Cisco customers should continue to use the Cisco TAC for technical support on Cisco products. For more information about opening a technical support case and for regional TAC telephone numbers, refer to Cisco Worldwide Support Contacts.

Piston Cloud Computing End of Support / End of Life Notice

 

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The acquisition of Piston will complement Cisco's Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud. Piston's deep knowledge of distributed systems and automated deployment will help further enhance the platform and our delivery capabilities for customers and partners, better positioning Cisco to address the market demands for our Cisco Intercloud Services offerings.