IBM and Pivotal to accelerate open cloud innovation with cloud foundry

ARMONK and SAN FRANCISCO, USA: IBM and Pivotal announced that the two companies will collaborate on further development of the Cloud Foundry platform and open source project, and work towards establishing an open governance model for the community.

Cloud Foundry is an interoperable Platform-as-a-Service framework that allows users to have freedom of choice across cloud infrastructure and application programming models, and cloud applications.

Working with more than 9,000 cloud clients, IBM sees an increasing appetite for cloud-based mobile, social and analytics applications from line-of-business executives. CIOs need a more open and vibrant cloud development platform, such as Cloud Foundry, to meet that demand and avoid vendor lock-in. An open Cloud Foundry platform enables clients to rapidly build, deploy and manage cloud applications in a more agile, more scalable manner, with confidence. For example, a retailer can quickly create an e-commerce app to take advantage of a current promotion that could run on various cloud infrastructures.

"Cloud Foundry's potential to transform business is vast, and steps like the one taken today help open the ecosystem up for greater client innovation," said Daniel Sabbah, general manager of Next Generation Platforms, IBM. "IBM will incorporate Cloud Foundry into its open cloud architecture, and put its full support behind Cloud Foundry as an open and collaborative platform for cloud application development, as it has done historically for key technologies such as Linux and OpenStack."

Pivotal will establish a community advisory board of Cloud Foundry users and vendors-including IBM-to guide the community as outlined on the Cloud Foundry site. Pivotal will continue to steward the Cloud Foundry brand and preserve the trademark from direct commercial use in product names. IBM and Pivotal will co-host a community conference for Cloud Foundry Sept. 8-9 in Santa Clara, Calif.

"We believe that the Cloud Foundry platform has the potential to become an extraordinary asset that many players can leverage in an open way to enable a new generation of applications for the cloud," said Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal. "IBM's considerable investment in Cloud Foundry is already producing great results with application-centric cloud offerings such as making IBM WebSphere Liberty available on Cloud Foundry. We look forward to growing and expanding an open Cloud Foundry community together with IBM."