OpenStack Founder Joins Pivotal

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Sept. 30 — Pivotal, the company at the intersection of big data, PaaS, and agile development, today announced that cloud visionary Joshua McKenty will join Pivotal. McKenty brings to Pivotal his experience as co-founder of OpenStack, founder of Piston Cloud Computing, and founding Technical Architect of NASA Nebula, the Federal Government’s first cloud computing platform, to become a Field CTO for Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry team.

McKenty’s storied career spans two decades of experience in software development, cloud architecture, management and entrepreneurship.  At Pivotal, he will work directly on the front lines with Fortune 100 customers who are looking to transition to the 3rd platform. Additionally, he will work closely with Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry team to drive new features and functionality to the platform.

Cloud Foundry has emerged as the industry standard enterprise application platform for the cloud era. By automating resources across OpenStack, vSphere and Amazon Web Services, the platform enables a radical reduction in the complexity of application lifecycle management for both developers and IT operators.

Pivotal CF is the leading commercial distribution of Cloud Foundry from Pivotal. With ever expanding capabilities for mobile integrations, data services, microservice architectures and continuous delivery, Pivotal CF is transforming enterprises in every industry.

A 2013 San Francisco Business Times 40-Under-40 Leader and NASA Ames Honor Award Recipient, Joshua has been instrumental in moving several groundbreaking cloud projects from inception to influencing the broader cloud computing market. Before OpenStack became the dominant open cloud solution it is today, with multi-billion dollar commitments from IBM, HP, Cisco and Red Hat, and from virtualization leader VMware, Mr. McKenty played an instrumental role in developing the NASA-sponsored IaaS that would become OpenStack’s flagship project.

As co-founder of Piston Cloud Computing, he helped shepherd the company into a mature software business that has experienced exponential year-over-year revenue growth, attracting marquee customers with innovative enterprise private cloud solutions, including the first commercially supported OpenStack/Cloud Foundry integration.

McKenty joins other industry luminaries who recently signed onto Pivotal, including Puppet Labs co-founder Andrew Shafer and Simon Elisha who previously served as an Amazon Web Services Cloud Architect. They bring more technical firepower and expertise to help Pivotal’s customers shape their private and hybrid cloud architectures with Pivotal CF.