# Peter Nickolov > Principal Engineer at Cisco | Serial Entrepreneur | Cloud Native & DevOps Innovator Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/peternickolov - Accomplished serial entrepreneur and innovator (5 startups, 22+ issued patents) - Software executive who delivers successfully new types of products in fast-paced environments - Recognized expert in scalable infrastructure technologies - Cloud computing pioneer - Engaging presenter and panelist at industry conferences (O'Reily Velocity, VMWorld, Cloud Expo) ## Work Experience ### Principal Engineer @ Cisco Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Led the integration of the Opsani ML-driven optimization technology into the emerging Cisco Observability Platform. Integrated the startup team and team's rituals into Cisco's 80,000+ person organization. Presented the integrated active optimization technology to partners and customers at Cisco Live Las Vegas 2023. Continues to drive the development of new product capabilities. Founder and primary maintainer of the fsoc open source project (https://github.com/cisco-open/fsoc). Fsoc is the command line interface to the Cisco Observability Platform; it streamlines and improves the developer experience, making it easy for internal and partner developers alike to build and publish applications on the platform. Fsoc is developed in a collaborative fashion, with over 20 domain experts contributing the functionality needed for each platform service. ### Founder, CTO and VP Engineering @ Opsani Jan 2014 – Jan 2022 | Redwood City, California Pioneering Continuous Optimization: The essential 3rd phase of the CI/CD Pipeline. Opsani AI measures, predicts and implements changes to parameters and resource settings across containers, VM instances, middleware and applications to maximize performance and reduce costs autonomously for cloud applications. Key Awards: - Gartner Cool Vendor 2020 (Cloud Computing) - 2021 Big50 Startup! To read the report, sign up here: https://lnkd.in/g7Ax8Yuu Opsani was acquired by Cisco in February 2022. ### Advisor @ HyperHQ Inc. Jan 2014 – Jan 2019 Hyper's runV is a hypervisor-based Docker runtime. It provides a fundamentally new technology that allows launching lightweight virtual machine instances with any Docker image in 200-300msec, while enjoying the strong isolation in the hypervisor. HyperHQ also provided a nodeless container-as-a-service cloud service and Hypernetes, a secure, multi-tenant Kubernetes distribution, presented at the OpenStack Tokyo Summit and DockerCon Europe. Hyper's open source technology was merged with Intel's Clear Containers to form the Kata Containers project. ### Advisor @ BLAB Jan 2013 – Jan 2017 | Seattle, WA We know what your customer will be talking about in the next 72 hours, and we know where they will be doing so. We predict tomorrow's conversations today. Blab is a pioneer in the category of Predictive Social Intelligence. Blab applies proprietary machine learning technology and big data processing to contextualize and predict tomorrow’s online conversations today. Brands rely on Blab to contextualize and predict conversations that engage their target audiences, so they can maximize conversation opportunities and minimize threats. ### Advisor @ Kismatic, Inc. Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Kismatic is the enterprise Kubernetes company; we provide support, services and tooling for running and operating Kubernetes at scale and in production. The team at Kismatic are the also the organizers of KubeCon - the premier conference for the Kubernetes community. Check out the latest at http://kubecon.io ### Advisor @ VisualOps Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area and Bejing, China VisualOps is a visual DevOps automation SaaS for AWS, OpenStack and Docker. ### Sr VP Software Engineering, AppLogic Cloud Platform. Distinguished Engineer. @ CA Technologies, Inc Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | California Led the integration of the 3Tera product, people and technology into the systems and products of CA Technologies, ensuring a smooth transition for both employees and customers. Retained the entire original engineering team for over 36 months. Directed further technology development and scaled the team to over 100 members, spanning 11 locations and 4 continents. Product sales increased over 8x within the first 24 months. Qualified for and earned the title of CA Distinguished Engineer, a “fellow”-like designation given to the highest level technology leaders in the company. ### Founder, President and CTO @ 3TERA, INC. Jan 2007 – Jan 2010 Pioneered software appliances and cloud application store. Cloud service and application migration across 4 continents in 2009. The first cloud computing platform to demonstrate support for IPv6. 3Tera was acquired by CA Technologies in 2010. ### Founder, VP Engineering and CTO @ 3TERA, INC. Jan 2003 – Jan 2007 Cloud pioneer - first cloud computing platform for private, public and hybrid cloud ### Founder and VP Software @ Z-force, Inc. / Attune Systems Jan 1999 – Jan 2003 | Santa Clara, California; Laguna Hills, California Pioneer in scale-out storage systems. Acquired by F5. ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/peternickolov - Portfolio: http://www.opsani.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/peternickolov JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/peternickolov/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12