The OpenStack ecosystem saw another early distributor bow out this week when Cisco Systems, Inc. announced the acquisition of Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. in a deal that has in many ways been a long time coming. The move brings full circle a period of unprecedented consolidation for OpenStack.

The crunch started with the networking giant buying out distributor Metacloud, Inc. to provide the necessary value-added capabilities needed for customers to standardize their OpenStack implementations on its converged infrastructure. EMC followed that up the following month with the acquisition of The CloudScaling Group. Inc. and its competing platform.

But the purchase of Piston Cloud takes less after those deals than the most recent bout of consolidation in the OpenStack ecosystem, which saw Nebula, Inc., a distributor founded the very same year, shut down and send 40 engineers to Oracle’s cloud business. While the two startups met their ends in entirely different ways, the outcome is largely the same.

Cisco business development vice president Hilton Romanski made no mention of Piston Cloud’s platform in the brief post he published on his official blog to announce the deal, instead choosing to focus exclusively on the talent. Like Oracle, the company simply couldn’t pass up on such a rare opportunity to hire an established team of OpenStack experts.

And also like the database giant, Cisco doesn’t have too much use for its new acquisition’s OpenStack distribution, since the purchase of Metacloud already took that off the checklist. The main difference is that the networking giant didn’t wait for Piston Cloud to close its doors before swooping in on the team.

The transaction is a win-win for all parties. The startup’s investors can claim a successful exit, while the networking giant gains much-needed talent to help cement its place in the OpenStack’s future. “Cisco is consistently listed as an integral partner when users look at cloud,” noted Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman. “The expanded push to embrace OpenStack – and open-source in general – is a smart move for Cisco to maintain strong positioning in a rapidly changing and competitive ecosystem.”

The Piston Cloud team will report to the company’s senior vice president of cloud infrastructure and managed services, Faiyaz Shahpurwala, in their new roles. Cisco didn’t specify how much money is changing hands in the transaction, but it’s likely not too much more than the roughly $22 million that the startup has raised over its five years of existence.