The Under the Radar competition selects a handful of the industry’s most compelling emerging startups that provide cutting edge solutions. These companies present to top IT executives looking to partner with and acquire new technologies. Under the Radar has been recognized as one of the most important showcases of innovation and as an essential deal-making forum in Silicon Valley. In the past four years, 67% of the presenters have gone on to raise funding and/or be acquired by Google, Yahoo, Cisco, BT, Microsoft, Twitter, Fox Interactive, and others.

Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Gretchen Curtis presented Piston Cloud’s product and market strategy to judges Yobie Benjamin, Managing Director and Global CTO of Citigroup, Mike Habeck, a Director at Deloitte Consulting, and Tom Peck, CIO of Levi Strauss & Co. If you missed the live stream of the event, you can watch the video below:

Many thanks to all of the judges and presenting startups. We’re looking forward to presenting in the graduate circle in November, and to all future opportunities to promote the OpenStack community.

        

James brings an upbeat attitude, energy, and style to Piston Cloud, where he will focus on driving revenue, speeding growth, increasing brand awareness, boosting market share, building strong relationships, and maximizing potential opportunities.

Under the Radar has been recognized as one of the most important showcases of innovation in Silicon Valley. Each year, Under the Radar selects a handful of the industry’s most compelling emerging startups providing cutting-edge solutions. Past winners include LinkedIn, Pandora and Flickr.

Gretchen will give a 6-minute presentation on Piston Cloud’s Piston Enterprise OS, followed by an 8-minute Q&A with the Under The Radar judges.

Piston Cloud will present in the Infrastructure category from 11:30 – 1:00 p.m. and you can watch live via streaming at the Under the Radar site.

Right now, we need your help. We only have until 5:00 p.m. PDT (yes, you read that right, until 5 today) to collect as many votes from the community as possible.

Follow us on Twitter at @pistoncloud to find out the number to text to vote for Piston Cloud! It only takes a minute (we promise).

Thank you!

PPP:

How did you get here?

Karen:

Long story short: Craigslist. I worked in healthcare for over eight years and I just got burnt out, so I decided to go to law school. While I was in school I needed a part time job and found an opening at Piston Cloud. My focus in school was IP law and that along with my degree in English literature, made this opportunity a great fit.

PPP:

What do you do here at Piston Cloud?

Karen:

I do a little bit of everything, which is common in a startup. Marketing, office management, human resources, benefits, new hires, basically making sure everyone has what they need and also making sure that we are a fun company to work for.

PPP:

What sort of “fun” things does Piston Cloud do?

Karen:

A few weeks ago we organized Piston Family Day, which was so much fun. A lot of our employees have families still living in Canada, and bunch of them happened to be in town one weekend, so we all got together on Saturday and brought in toys and games for the kids, it was great to spend time together outside of work.

PPP:

Back to nursing. Are there skills that you learned as a nurse that you have carried over to your role at Piston Cloud?

Karen:

I was a high-risk labor and delivery nurse. As you can imagine I was under continuous pressure and had to be extremely task oriented. I had to be sure that absolutely all T’s were crossed and I’s were dotted and extremely organized ahead of time. It is the same thing here at Piston Cloud. Everything I do is part of bigger process that keeps the company running.

PPP:

What’s on your playlist?

Karen:

Barton Hollow by The Civil Wars, the whole Swedish House Mafia CD and Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. My husband and I are die-hard Giants fans – I bleed black and orange!

The same can be said for your infrastructure. A delicate balance exists within your data center. If a server goes down, what are the ramifications? For most organizations, the ripple effect of a server going offline is far-reaching. Everything from employee productivity to customer satisfaction is negatively affected by downtime. Who’s dropping the ball in your organization?

Here at Piston Cloud, we believe that managing your infrastructure shouldn’t be a juggling act. Piston Enterprise OS intelligently and dynamically allocates workloads across your cloud based on the current availability of compute, storage and networking resources. You can lose up to two entire servers per rack to catastrophic hardware failure without impacting your running VMs and without losing any data, meaning your organization stays online, even when disaster strikes. With Piston Enterprise OS, you don’t have to worry about dropping the ball. Now that’s magic.

The OpenStack Foundation will be an independent body providing shared resources to promote OpenStack software and empower the community around it, including users, developers, and the entire ecosystem. Piston Cloud is among 19 companies involved in the foundation creation, committed to “The OpenStack Way,” an open development process that is driven by a technical meritocracy, supported by significant investments in community building, and focused on driving adoption.

The process for finalizing the foundation documents will be open to all, with the initial committed companies providing legal support to aid in the drafting process. For more information please visit the OpenStack Foundation Governance Wiki.

Josh Kearney lives and works in beautiful Hazel Green, Wisconsin. An early computer hobbyist on the development side, his first job was with a local newspaper, the Telegraph Herald. A few years later, Silicon Valley came calling and he moved to Sunnyvale for a job with Blue Coat, a web security firm. He moved back to Hazel Green for a network admin position with an electric company before getting snatched up by Slicehost. One week later, Rackspace purchased Slicehost where he was later put on the OpenStack Nova development team. When not producing perfect pieces of Python for Piston, you can find Josh sipping a glass of Maker’s Mark with his beautiful wife.

Say hello to Mr. Kearney at the OpenStack Design Summit & Conference coming up on April 16th.

PPP:

So, how did you get here? Describe your journey.

Mandell:

About 7 years ago, I worked with Josh on the Netscape project and I kept up with him through his career as we always hoped for an opportunity to work together again some day. Shortly after Piston Cloud received financing, I received a tweet from Josh saying, “we should talk Visa” (Mandell is Canadian). A week later, I was in San Francisco and working at Piston Cloud. The rest, as they say, is history.

PPP:

What was the worst job you ever had and what did you learn from it?

Mandell:

Let’s just say it was a government job. The biggest thing I learned was that having a network cable run between two buildings with different ground potentials is not a good thing.

PPP:

If you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?

Mandell:

I’d like to see an end to senseless violence.

PPP:

What are your three favorite online tools and what do you love about them?

Mandell:

Gmail, because its easy to search through and has good storage. Flickr, because I really like photography in theory. Facebook, because it allows me to keep track of my large, extended family.

PPP:

What is the one book that you think everyone should read?

Mandell:

The Wealthy Barber

PPP:

What’s on your playlist right now?

Mandell:

Man or Muppet from the new Muppets movie, Our House by Madness and Africa by Toto.

PPP:

Name two or three people we should follow on Twitter and why?

Mandell:

@Donttrythis (Adam Savage) because MythBusters is a lot of fun. @grantimahara because of the amazing pictures he shares from the set. And @RealTimeWWII because it offers a new perspective on the war and its as though you are experiencing the events in real-time even though it was over 70 year ago.

PPP:

Who is your hero?

Mandell:

I have two: my surrogate grandfather, Aage, and my Dad. My Dad because when he retired he began taking a correspondence course on small appliance repair and in that moment I realized, “Wow you can keep learning even after you retire.” I really admire that.

You can tweet Mandell @mdegerne and stalk him on LinkedIn.

A new IT Pro Impact Report from InformationWeek goes “under the covers” with Piston Cloud, providing third party analysis on the technology, and timely reading for anyone considering private cloud.

The thorough report covers the drivers behind enterprise cloud adoption, an introduction to OpenStack, and Piston Cloud’s significant additions to the OpenStack framework including the security-hardened Linux distribution that powers our Piston Enterprise OS offering.

About Piston Cloud, author and IT analyst Kurt Marko writes:

Piston’s mix of a commercially supported, open source-developed software stack on commodity hardware offers the same value proposition to the cloud stack world as Red Hat Linux pioneered on conventional servers: less expensive hardware, no vendor lock-in, faster development cycles and arguably better security thanks to more eyeballs looking for holes and fixes.

The report continues…

Yet Piston Cloud is far from just an OpenStack support service; the company, Piston Cloud Computing, has added a substantial amount of intellectual property to the OpenStack core. The result is an environment worthy of the enterprise label: It’s robust, convenient, secure and easily managed.

And in conclusion, the report highlights Piston Enterprise OS as…

A complete private cloud environment using a build-as-you-grow, scale-out architecture amenable to low-cost commodity servers with internal storage. Easy to buy and install; all cloud features – virtual servers, storage, network, self-service portal – in one package.

Read the full article at InformationWeek Reports (you’ll need to sign up for a free account).