Enterprise OpenStack company Piston Cloud Computing announced on Monday that it has raised $8 million in series B funding to drive product development
Enterprise OpenStack company Piston Cloud Computing announced on Monday that it has raised $8 million in series B funding to drive product development and meet the needs of its growing customer base.
The community of OpenStack has grown to nearly 7,000 people from 87 countries, and recently, the commercial side of OpenStack has seen growing interest from investors. For instance, at the beginning of January, Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital injected $11 million in OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis.
Cisco Systems, Data Collective and Swisscom Ventures join Divergent Ventures, Hummer Winblad and True Ventures as principal investors in Piston, and this funding round follows a $4.5 million Series A round in July 2011.
Piston has focused on developing new products for its enterprise products recently by naming Jim Morrisoe chief executive officer, giving co-founder and former CEO Joshua McKenty the ability to focus on the technical side of the business, and maintain his role within OpenStack on the board of directors.
Since its launch in early 2011, Piston launched the first commercial OpenStack distribution Piston Enterprise Openstack software for building and managing IaaS cloud on bare-metal, converged commodity hardware, and introduced the first commercially available VDI solution for OpenStack, via an exclusive licensing agreement with Gridcentric.
“Our investors’ confidence in Piston Cloud validates our strategy and the pioneering work we have done over the last two plus years in the OpenStack community,” Morrisoe, Piston Cloud CEO said in a statement. “This new investment will enable us to build on this foundation and to accelerate our growth as we work to enhance our products, grow our customer base and establish new partnerships.”
Talk back: Do you offer any OpenStack cloud solutions to your customers? Have you noticed more enterprises interested in OpenStack? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
