IBM and Pivotal to Accelerate Open Cloud Innovation with Cloud Foundry

Pivotal, IBM to work with community to further develop the Cloud Foundry platform and establish open governance model for Cloud Foundry; Project to help developers drive open, collaborative innovation for cloud-based apps

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IBM

Jul 24, 2013, 07:30 ET

ARMONK, N.Y. and SAN FRANCISCO, July 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Pivotal announced today 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.

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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."

IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core Available on the Cloud Foundry Platform
IBM and Pivotal are also collaborating on the technology that enables programming languages or frameworks to be deployed on the Cloud Foundry platform. Early fruit of this collaboration is a preview version of WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core, IBM's innovative lightweight version of the WebSphere Application Server. It helps clients respond to enterprise and market needs more quickly by enabling less complex, rapid development and deployment of web, mobile, social and analytic applications using fewer resources. With the capabilities of the WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core running on Cloud Foundry, developers benefit from the robustness of the WebSphere platform and the innovation of the emerging cloud architecture.

Platform: The Cloud Foundry Community Event 
Co-hosted by IBM and Pivotal on September 8-9 in Santa Clara, Calif., Platform, the Cloud Foundry Conference, is a unique community event focused on the industry leading open Platform-as-a-Service, Cloud Foundry. The two-day event will feature presentations by the thought leaders behind the technology as well as community presentations by companies that are using Cloud Foundry to build a new class of dynamic, agile, elastic and intelligent application platform. More information at http://www.platformcf.com

About Cloud Foundry 
Cloud Foundry is the leading open platform-as-a-service, providing an open ecosystem of developer frameworks and application services. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry is an Apache 2.0 licensed project, stewarded by Pivotal, and available on Github: https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more about Cloud Foundry visit http://www.cloudfoundry.com/.

About Pivotal 
Pivotal's mission is to help customers build, deploy, scale and analyze at an unprecedented velocity as they solve some of the world's most challenging problems, pursue the greatest opportunities, and serve their customers in the context of who they are, where they are, and what they need in the moment. Pivotal is a leading provider of application and data infrastructure software, agile development services, and data science consulting. Pivotal's next-generation Enterprise PaaS product, Pivotal One will be available in Q4 2013. Learn more at www.gopivotal.com . Follow Pivotal on Twitter @gopivotal and LinkedIn, G+.

About IBM
On a Smarter Planet, big data and analytics, cloud, mobile and social business solutions are driving innovation among the world's systems and industries as they become more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. To help clients meet these growing demands, IBM offers a range of transformative capabilities in these markets:

Offering the broadest choice of high-value private, public and hybrid cloud technology solutions, IBM SmartCloud enables rapid innovation and scalability.
IBM MobileFirst combines security, analytics and app development software to manage clients' mobile infrastructure, regardless of device.
IBM has the industry's deepest portfolio of big data solutions with powerful analytics that enable clients to execute big data strategies and deliver business insights.
IBM social business technologies go beyond social media to reinvent the way people connect, communicate and share information to uncover new opportunities.

To learn more, visit www.ibm.com/smarterplanet and follow @SmarterPlanet, @IBMAnalytics, @IBMSocialBiz, @IBMcloud and @IBMmobile.

For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/smartcloud. Follow our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com.  

© 2013 GoPivotal, Inc. All rights reserved. Pivotal and Cloud Foundry are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of GoPivotal, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other marks may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact:

David Oro
Pivotal Corporate Communications
415-885-9898
[email protected]

Colleen Haikes
IBM Media Relations
415-545-4003
[email protected]

SOURCE IBM