Leading Companies Invest in Piston's OpenStack Projects

OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, currently appears to be gaining traction as many large companies have been investing in OpenStack projects. Hummer Winbald and True Ventures led a $4.5 million funding to enable Piston Cloud Computing Inc., to deliver secure, private cloud solutions based on the open source cloud operating system.

The latest round of funding in which Divergent Ventures and others also participated, was accompanied by Lars Leckie from Hummer Winblad (News - Alert), and Puneet Agarwal from True Ventures joining the Board of Directors at Piston.

“OpenStack has seen unprecedented market traction in the last year. There is a growing demand for a cost-effective, standards-based cloud solution suitable for enterprise and we think Piston’s team is best suited to deliver it,” said Lars Leckie, of Hummer Winblad, in a press release. “We are really excited about the technology they are building.”

Piston delivers enterprise-class software built on OpenStack, which was launched by NASA and Rackspace (News - Alert) in 2010. This open-source project has more than 1,100 contributors and 82 participating companies and appears to be experiencing rapid global growth.

“This is great news for OpenStack. We’re excited to see investment in the community and a healthy ecosystem of both established and emerging companies engaged in the project,” said Jim Curry, GM, Rackspace Cloud Builders, in a statement.

Piston's OpenStack team consists of veterans drawn from NASA and other participating organizations.

Joshua McKenty, CEO, Piston, was the Cloud Architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud infrastructure, while

Piston’s CTO, Christopher MacGown, was a Technical Lead at SliceHost, acquired by Rackspace in 2008. McKenty is on on OpenStack’s Policy Board.

Piston Cloud technology is currently in limited beta and a public release is expected in Q4 2011.