On June 12, 2015 Cisco acquired Piston Cloud Computing, a privately held San Francisco based Openstack product company. Piston provides software that enables streamlined operational deployment of large scale distributed systems. Piston's enterprise grade software helps customers automate orchestration and deployment of underlying distributed systems for running applications on OpenStack.

Cloud computing has dramatically changed the IT landscape. To enable greater business agility and help lower costs, organizations are shifting from a primarily on-premise IT structure to hybrid IT: a mix of private cloud, public cloud, and on-premise applications.

Cisco addresses the changing needs of its enterprise and service provider customers through its Intercloud strategy. Intercloud is an open solution that brings together organizations' private clouds, major public clouds, and Cisco and partner clouds, and enables movement of workloads across heterogeneous environments.

M&A and investments are an important part of our build, buy, partner and integrate strategy. This acquisition advances our Intercloud strategy and supports our leadership in cloud services, to provide best-in-class solutions for our customers.