Piston Cloud Computing

The company's core product, Piston CloudOS, was an operating system designed to automate the deployment and orchestration of private clouds on commodity, bare-metal hardware. This allowed agile development teams to deploy services and frameworks without managing complex infrastructure. Piston's software integrated compute, storage, and networking into a hyper-converged architecture, aiming to improve data center efficiency and provide elastic, scalable computing resources. The platform supported integrations with various automation and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) tools like Cloud Foundry, Puppet Labs, and RightScale. In later versions, it expanded beyond OpenStack to support big data frameworks like Hadoop and Spark.

Piston Cloud Computing raised a total of $12.5 million in funding over two rounds. A $4.5 million Series A was raised in July 2011, followed by an $8 million Series B in February 2013 with investors including Cisco Systems, True Ventures, and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. The company served clients concerned with data privacy, such as those in the financial services, healthcare, and biotech sectors, with customers including Swisscom and King Digital Entertainment.

In June 2015, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Piston Cloud Computing for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was part of Cisco's broader strategy to enhance its Intercloud services, a globally connected network of clouds. Piston's team and their expertise in OpenStack and distributed systems were integrated into Cisco's Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services Organization to bolster Cisco's private cloud automation and scaling capabilities.