Piston CTO and Co-Founder Joshua McKenty Named to 2014 CRN Top 100 List

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – Aug 11, 2014) – Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack® company, today announced that its CTO and Co-founder, Joshua McKenty, has been named to the prestigious 2014 CRN Top 100 list. These 100 leaders, hand-picked by the CRN Editorial staff, represent the top influencers, sales leaders, innovators, and disruptors in the IT channel.

McKenty was included in the “Disruptors” category, which CRN defines as someone who is “bucking the established order, driving changes in industry dynamics and leading to more opportunities for partners with higher service revenues.”

McKenty has more than two decades of experience in entrepreneurship, management and software engineering, and architecture. Prior to his current role as Co-founder and CTO of Piston, McKenty was a technical architect at NASA where he co-founded the OpenStack project. He currently serves on both the OpenStack Foundation’s Board of Directors and the Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board.

The CRN Top 100 list is based on feedback gathered from technology solution providers throughout the year by CRN editors with rankings reflecting each company’s channel influence, effectiveness, and visibility, along with its business and sales impact on the IT channel.

The CRN Top 100 honorees are featured in the August issue of CRN, the top news source for solution providers, and the IT channel, and is available online at www.crn.com.

Supporting Quotes
“I’ve been called disruptive my entire life so it’s nice to finally have it work in my favor. But in all seriousness, I sincerely appreciate the acknowledgement. Piston has been and continues to be committed to the channel and it’s an honor to be listed alongside these IT industry leaders.” 
-Joshua McKenty, CTO and Co-founder at Piston

“The CRN Top 100 list is the ‘Who’s Who’ of the IT channel. Each individual on this list has left an indelible stamp on the IT channel this year. Some are industry veterans with innovative leadership styles. Others are rising stars who have demonstrated a deep commitment to the channel. All deserve recognition for helping push the channel forward toward new market opportunities.”
-Robert Faletra, CEO of The Channel Company

Additional Resources

• Piston website
• Piston blog
• Piston on Twitter
• Piston customer case studies
• Piston OpenStack™ software

About Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.
Founded in 2011, Piston makes private cloud software that enables DevOps teams to easily deploy and manage a complete OpenStack-based application development environment without IT operations expertise or specialized appliances. Piston delivers the agility and cost savings of public cloud without the hassle of managing a typical on-premise solution. Piston is an OpenStack Foundation Gold Member, based in San Francisco, and funded by True Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Swisscom Ventures, Cisco Systems, Inc., Data Collective, and Divergent Ventures. Visit Piston online at www.pistoncloud.com.

About The Channel Company
 The Channel Company is the channel community’s trusted authority for growth and innovation, with established brands including CRN, XChange Events, IPED, and SharedVue. For more than three decades, we have leveraged our proven and leading-edge platforms to deliver prescriptive sales and marketing solutions for the technology channel. The Channel Company provides Communication, Recruitment, Engagement, Enablement, Demand Generation and Intelligence services to drive technology partnerships. Learn more at www.thechannelcompany.com.