I've learned more about trademark rules in the last year than I probably ever wanted to. I'll explain.

About two years ago, Cisco acquired Metacloud, the company I worked for, along with a team of brilliant engineers, product managers, marketers, and operations folks. As we worked through the integration process, we learned that while our founders secured the Metacloud trademark in the United States, we didn't own it in France. As a global company, this created an issue for Cisco, so we became Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud, and later, Cisco Metapod.

And yes, we know Metapod is a Pokemon character. And yes, we saw The Register poking fun, and we laughed with you.

Metapod never felt quite right, so a few months ago, we negotiated with the French company. As of today, we're happy to announce that we have secured the rights to use Metacloud again.

Aside from making a trove of old t-shirts relevant again, this name change also marks a new era for Metacloud under the leadership of Kip Compton. Our product-the combination ofsoftware, hardware, and team who operates it in anas a Servicemodel-has undergone some changes resulting in significant improvements. Recently, we rebased our platform and toolsets to leverage Red Hat's OpenStack distribution so we could focus on adding value beyond what you'd find in a standard OpenStack deployment. We've added some additional monitoring capabilities. We've hired more folks and introduced a new Delivery Management role to work with our customers as we build, operate, and scale deployments and availability zones.

On the engineering side, we've reorganized to drive consistency across a base platform so we can take advantage of security and networking technologies as well as containers and microservices tooling. As we look toward the end of the calendar year, we'll also have some exciting integrations to announce and additional services and capabilities you won't find anywhere else.

Operating a cloud can be costly and time consuming, but it doesn't have to be. Most of our customers have gone down a DIY path to validate OpenStack for private cloud usage, but struggle to keep their platforms stable, performant, and up-to-date. Others are looking for a way to augment their public cloud usage to save money and keep data on-premises. Then there are those who lack budget or talent to deploy and operate at scale.

Some of our customers have spoken publicly about their success with Metacloud, including Chris Launey of Disney, and Mark Dickerson from Technicolor. Weston Jossey of Tapjoy detailed the cost savings over public cloud and the increase in performance. And not a single customer has left us. In fact, most of our customers continue to grow with us by adding additional capacity or availability zones. Use cases include software testing and development, big data, media storage and/or delivery, ITaaS, and beyond. Pretty meta, right?

Over the course of the next few days, you'll start seeing Metacloud replacing Metapod on our web pages and in our materials. In the meantime, if you'd like a demo, or you're interested in a TCO/ROI evaluation, we're happy to help. Visit the Metacloud website to find out more.

Signed,

Your friendly neighborhood evangelista, Niki Acosta

Follow me at @nikiacosta