The OpenStack consolidation continues: Piston, Blue Box acquired by Cisco, IBM
Silicon Valley moves fast, and nowhere is it more obvious than in the world of mergers and acquisitions. This morning, the news broke that both Piston and Blue Box, two of the last three major independent OpenStack companies are being acquired, with Cisco announcing its intent to purchase Piston, and IBM announcing its purchase of Blue Box<sup>6</sup>
IBM already has a firm foothold in the cloud and OpenStack world, with its Softlayer datacenters and its position in the top 5 OpenStack contributors. In apress release, IBM General Manager of Cloud Services, Jim Comfort said, “The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy making it easier for our clients to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”
For its part, Blue Box is looking forward to the might that comes with Big Blue. In a blog post, Blue Box founder Jesse Proudman said, “IBM is in the midst of a massive transformation, placing the weight of its 400,000+ exceptional employees behindfour strategic imperatives: Commerce, Analytics, Security and Cloud. For IBM, acquiring Blue Box is a way to turbo-charge their cloud strategy: Our technology and business model will become a formational kernel for the IBM Cloud organization to rally around for private cloud. Add SoftLayer’s global footprint and IBM’s OpenStack upstream capabilities, and I can’t think of an organization better suited to tackle this challenge.”
Meanwhile,Piston will be going to Cisco, which purchased Metacloud last September. The company is focusing on using Piston’s knowledge of deploying OpenStack to further its plans for the Intercloud, a network of interlocked clouds that enable users to choose where to run their workloads. According to Fortune, Scott Sanchez, director of product strategy for Cisco’s cloud efforts, who joined the company in the Metacloud acquisition, said, “Piston and Metacloud are a good ‘peanut-butter-and-jelly’ match in that Piston focused on automated deployment capabilities that ease installation of OpenStack technology, while Metacloud focused on operating the clouds once they were set up.”
Terms for neither deal were immediately available.
