From the “I Didn’t See That One Coming” files:
Joshua McKenty is one of my favorite people in the OpenStack communi
ty. He’s one of the co-founders of the NASA side of OpenStack, a co-founder for Piston Cloud Computing and a member of the OpenStack Foundation Board.
I just found out that McKenty is leaving Piston, the company he helped to create after leaving NASA and is now moving to a new role at Pivotal.
Officially, McKenty will be the Field CTO of Cloud Foundry. This is a big deal.
It means renewed respect and credibility for Cloud Foundry as major force not just in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) space but in the broader cloud and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) space as well.
Simply put, there are few humans on this planet we call Earth, with the depth of experience and the ability to articulate what OpenStack should be, like McKenty.
What this means to Piston is not all bad either. In 2012, McKenty found himself a new CEO for Piston with Jim Morrisroe. I have no reason to suspect that Morrisroe has done anything other than an exemplary job. On the marketing side, Piston has McKenty’s co-founder, the incomparable Gretchen Curtis. So while the loss of McKenty can be described as nothing less then epic, I suspect that Piston will continue to be a successful player in the OpenStack market for years to come.
And to you Joshua – good luck in this Pivotal new role.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
