Cloud Foundry Foundation Established to Advance Platform-as-a-Service

Foundation expands to more than 40 member companies, sees major increase in  contributions to help drive global standards for Platform-as-a-Service

News Summary

• Cloud Foundry Foundation formed to establish formal open governance model for the Cloud Foundry open source project
• Intel joins as Platinum member; Hortonworks and SAS join as Gold members; new Silver Members include Akamai, AppDirect, Braintribe, Fujitsu, Mendix, Mimacom, Produban, and Toshiba Solutions
• Linux Foundation to provide management, operations and advocacy

SAN FRANCISCO, December 9, 2014 – Cloud Foundry Foundation,the global standard for open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today is announcing its launch as an independent nonprofit foundation. The Cloud Foundry Foundation will be managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and operate under a system of open governance created by a team of open source experts from founding Platinum Members EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware.

Cloud Foundry is the leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) open source project and has seen a 36-percent increase in community contributions and more than 1,700 pull requests in the last year. The project is also being used in a variety of commercial deployments including Pivotal Cloud Foundry^Ⓡ, IBM Bluemix^Ⓡ, HP Helion^Ⓡ and Canopy Cloud Fabric among others. These achievements coupled with new investments from an expanded membership advance and accelerate application development in the cloud era. As a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, the Cloud Foundry Foundation will also benefit from the industry’s deepest pool of open source expertise and guidance on best practices for management, operations, advocacy and governance.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation is also implementing a new approach to open source development called Dojo. This offers developers a unique “fast track” for commit rights, which often take more than a year to gain in a major project. A certification program will also be introduced in the new year to ensure consistency and compatibility across Cloud Foundry-branded products and services.

Recent technical features and community contributions to the project include:

• Docker support for Diego (early release available for testing)
• Ability to FUSE devices in containers
• Firehose: app logs and Cloud Foundry component metrics stream
• Expanded build pack support for Go, PHP, Python and more
• Internationalization and extensibility model for Cloud Foundry CLI
• BOSH external Cloud Provider Interface (CPI)

The rise of the DevOps role in the enterprise and the increasing number of multi-cloud environments makes the PaaS market one to watch. Research firm IDC forecasts for PaaS are increasingly aggressive with the latest data showing about a 27 percent estimated annual growth in the market over the 2013-2018 period.* The establishment of the Cloud Foundry Foundation will enable a strong ecosystem to support this growth and advance the state-of-the-art for open cloud.

“Community participation accelerates concepts to maturity, and is increasingly being adopted as a way to deliver open cloud-based solutions to customers,” according to Larry Carvalho, PaaS research manager at IDC. “The announcement of the Cloud Foundry Foundation aims to improve transparency and speed technical innovation of the open source platform.”

“The industry has been in need of an OpenStack equivalent for the unique characteristics of PaaS, and Cloud Foundry Foundation has managed to rally broad participation among key application infrastructure players in short order,’’ said Charlotte Dunlap, Sr. Analyst, Current Analysis. “The formalization of Cloud Foundry as an industry standard will only help spur further PaaS adoption by providing additional reassurance to enterprises which are looking to speed app development and avoid vendor lock-in.’’

Gold members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation include Accenture, ActiveState, BNY Mellon, Capgemini, CenturyLink, Ericsson, GE, Hortonworks, NTT, SAS, Swisscom, and Verizon.

Silver members include Akamai, Alpine Data Labs, Altoros, Anchora, Anynines, AppDirect, AppDynamics, Azul Systems, Blue Box, Braintribe, Canonical, Canopy, CloudCredo, Docker, Fujitsu, jFrog, Mimacom, Mendix, MongoDB, Piston Cloud Computing, Produban, Redis Labs, Stark & Wayne, Telus and Toshiba Solutions.

Quotes from Founding Platinum Members:

EMC

“Dating back to our earliest investments in Cloud Foundry and its technology, EMC has consistently engaged in progressing the industry to an environment where cloud portability and agility are a reality. Establishing an independent and well-supported Foundation to accelerate this work is a key milestone for the industry and will help IT organizations and cloud providers deliver on the customer vision of a flexible, interoperable and agile IT hybrid cloud experience. EMC is committed to contributing to Cloud Foundry and creating strong support for it in our wide range of offerings.” John Roese, Chief Technology Officer, EMC Corporation

HP

“Cloud Foundry is core to HP’s strategy of ushering in the new style of IT focused on developing, deploying and delivering cloud-native applications for the enterprise.  We believe innovation comes from open source and open platforms and are proud to support today’s announcement of the Cloud Foundry Foundation with a unique model of open governance. We look forward to participating in and helping grow the effort and the community.” Bill Hilf, Senior Vice President, Product and Services Management, HP Cloud

IBM

“IBM joined the Cloud Foundry project in June 2013, with a strong commitment, resources and the conviction to help make Cloud Foundry ready for the enterprise. As the foundation for IBM Bluemix, Cloud Foundry is an essential open technology for the IBM Cloud. We’re really excited to see the culmination of the nearly year long journey to open governance and the Cloud Foundry Foundation launch, and even more optimistic about Cloud Foundry’s future as the recognized standard for Platform-as-a-Service.” Angel Diaz, IBM Vice President Open Technology and Cloud Performance Solutions

Intel

“Consumers of cloud platforms are seeking open source frameworks to efficiently provision their applications. Broad industry collaboration provides the best path for adoption and innovation. The establishment of the Cloud Foundry Foundation provides a proven model to promote and accelerate open PaaS maturity. Intel is proud to be a founding member and we look forward to taking a leadership role in this important community effort.” Jonathan Donaldson, General Manager, Software Defined Infrastructure, Cloud Platforms Group, Intel Corporation

Pivotal

“The Cloud is too important to allow it to become proprietary and have customers locked in. It needs a healthy open ecosystem of users, developers and providers linked via a common, open platform, much as Linux provided for the server market. Not only is open source a key to this, but equally so is orderly, open governance and participation. The Cloud Foundry Foundation will ensure that Cloud Foundry is and remains an ecosystem where many players can contribute to the platform and benefit from it – knowing that they will be doing so in the context of an open, well-governed and directed community. It is really gratifying to see how far the community has come and all the good things that are happening.” Paul Maritz, CEO, Pivotal

SAP

“As a Platinum member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, SAP is actively engaged in helping to define one of the industry-leading, open-source PaaS technologies as well as part of the evolving ecosystem around it. It is important to be open, and we believe that Cloud Foundry is fast becoming ‘a platform of choice’ for many of SAP’s partners, customers and developers.  SAP is committed to contributing to open-source PaaS technologies, including integration of technologies such as the SAP HANA® platform and Internet of Things as part of SAP HANA Cloud Platform.” Björn Goerke, Executive Vice President and Corporate Officer, Product and Innovation Technology, SAP

VMware

“After spending years incubating at VMware, we are delighted to see Cloud Foundry being adopted as an industry standard for open platform as a service.  Cloud Foundry is a foundational part of VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy of allowing customers to build and run next-generation applications anywhere they want.  We look forward to the evolution of the platform, and to be part of the community driving that evolution.” Ajay Patel, vice president, Application as a Service, VMware

Quotes from Gold Members:

Accenture

“Expectations of enterprises to rapidly build and deploy contemporary, digital-enabled applications have never been higher.  Platform-as-a-Service architectures play a key role in meeting these needs throughout the development lifecycle of agile applications – all in an accelerated and cost-effective manner.  Accenture supports the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s aim to develop CF in open-source under a unique governance model.  We look forward to contributing to not only advancing the platform but also incorporating it into our own solutions.” Adam Burden, Global Lead – Advanced Technology & Architecture, Accenture

ActiveState

“Cloud Foundry is critical to our business, and we view the Foundation as a key way to ensure its longevity and stability. As more companies come together to contribute to this open source project, the ecosystem will only grow stronger and innovation will occur at an even faster pace.” Jeff Hobbs, CTO of ActiveState.

Capgemini

“Our clients are asking us for new agility to both create and sustain their digital transformation ambitions. Cloud Foundry will enable Capgemini to develop the next generation of agile and analytics aware applications that will drive their competitive advantage. As early adopters of Cloud, SaaS and PaaS, we are excited to join this broad industry coalition to bring industrialisation to multi-cloud PaaS.” André Cichowlas, Head of Delivery and Competitiveness, Capgemini

Hortonworks

“Cloud deployed applications are an increasingly important part of the enterprise IT solution and Hortonworks is intent upon driving innovation in the open and thus we fully back the Cloud Foundry Foundation and its objectives.” John Kreisa, Vice President Strategic Marketing, Hortonworks

NTT

“As a carrier grade cloud service provider, NTT has been providing Cloud Foundry based PaaS by integrating with advanced network services. We have been contributing to Cloud Foundry community from the very first of its source code release by introducing new features including “Nise-BOSH” and “BOSH AutoScaler”.  We are pleased to be a part of today’s launch of Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Gold member. With the establishment of the Foundation, we are convinced that the community will expand across the globe, and NTT is committed to contribute to its growth and strengthen the ecosystem.” Hikaru Suzuki, Vice President of Software Innovation Center, NTT

SAS

“SAS is proud to be part of the Cloud Foundry community.  As the leader in Business Analytics, SAS brings a unique perspective to the Enterprise Platform-as-a-Service space that will not only benefit our customers but also the community at large. We look forward to continuing, and advancing, the collaboration driven by the Cloud Foundry Foundation.” Craig Rubendall, Vice President R&D, SAS

Swisscom

“Cloud Foundry has advanced to the de facto standard in the industry. Swisscom has been one of the first contributors as we see a high innovation potential in the platform for managing high-scalable workloads. It allows Swisscom to offer leading edge cloud services.” Marco Hochstrasser, CEO of Swisscom Cloud Lab

Quotes from Silver Members

Akamai

“Continued success in using the cloud as a delivery environment for business and mission critical applications is predicated on the ability to seamlessly share workloads across different cloud environments, and ensure that application performance can be optimized and security threats mitigated, independent of from where the application is being hosted. Working with Cloud Foundry helps to ensure that organizations can take full advantage of an open cloud ecosystem to deliver highly performing and secure applications to their users.” Corey Scobie, Vice President, Open Platform, Akamai

Appdynamics

“The Cloud Foundry Foundation is composed of some of the biggest brands and brightest minds in technology. We are honored to be part of such an elite community and look forward to defining the standards for Open Source Platform-as-a-Service, which is increasingly becoming more important for enterprises. By joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, AppDynamics is excited about the opportunity to better serve our customers’ performance and scalability interests by contributing code and dedicating resources to the Cloud Foundry project.” Bhaskar Sunkara, Chief Technology Officer at AppDynamics.

Azul Systems

“An enterprise-class Java runtime is a key component of any successful Cloud Foundry deployment, and Azul has the domain expertise and tools to help Cloud Foundry Foundation members and their customers implement OpenJDK for enterprise use. Azul certifies every Zulu OpenJDK release, putting our stamp of approval that the required compliance and additional rigorous testing has been performed, giving users the confidence they need to use and deploy OpenJDK broadly.” Scott Sellers, Azul Systems President and CEO.

Braintribe

“We are thrilled to be working together with Cloud Foundry and to offer our tribefire platform on highly scalable public and hybrid cloud infrastructures. On the way to a digital enterprise, existing technologies are not fulfilling today’s expectations when it comes to working with data in an agile manner. Nor were they designed to support modern cloud based architectures. Adding tribefire, the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) layer, on top of traditional PaaS and IaaS services, enables customers and partners to easily access and virtualize both on premises and cloud data. tribefire allows the modeling of virtualized data, while automatically providing APIs (REST, Java) that can be used to realize new applications. This is possible thanks to tribefire Cortex, Braintribe’s patent pending data-centric development paradigm.” Stefan Ebner, Founder and CEO, Braintribe

Canonical

“Ubuntu is the preferred platform for scale-out workloads and, as such, we have seen a growing demand from our customers looking to deploy an open PaaS solution on metal and on clouds.   We believe Cloud Foundry provides that solution, and we look forward to our continued collaboration with the Cloud Foundry Foundation to drive its distribution, adoption and support.” Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical

Canopy

“As part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, our focus at Canopy is to work with enterprises around the world to help them unlock the benefits of PaaS and establish Cloud Foundry as the de facto standard. Our Canopy Cloud Fabric solution accelerates adoption of the technology by allowing enterprises to consume it as a managed cloud service with the tenancy, location and hosting options they need to meet stringent security and privacy needs, as well as comprehensive professional services and rock solid enterprise-class SLAs.” Darren Ratcliffe, Senior Vice President — PaaS, Canopy

Fujitsu

“Fujitsu is pleased to be a supporting member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and to contribute to the development and promotion of the open source PaaS. Openness of cloud computing technologies is crucial for our customers and for any enterprise doing business with such technologies. As cloud computing infrastructures are increasingly used as enterprise ICT platforms, the portability of enterprise applications and productivity in their development and management is becoming more important than ever.” Hiroshi Nagakura, Vice President, Strategy and Technology Division, Platform Strategic Planning Unit, Fujitsu Limited.

JFrog

“We are looking forward to driving the open source community even further forward, collaborating around cloud-based binary management solutions on the cloud foundry platform.” Fred Simon, Co-Founder & Chief Architect, JFrog

Mendix

“Cloud Foundry is quickly becoming the de facto standard for open PaaS. We have put our full support behind the project and are excited to be part of this thriving ecosystem. By integrating with Cloud Foundry and contributing to its development, we are able to offer our customers and partners more options for seamless, multi-cloud deployment.” Johan den Haan, CTO, Mendix

Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.

“Piston has been involved with the Cloud Foundry open source PaaS project for more than two years, working closely with the community to build a complete web-scale application development infrastructure stack that can be deployed and managed by developers, and requires no new cloud operations team. We look forward to working with our fellow Cloud Foundry Foundation members to drive adoption and development, and ultimately contribute to the long-term viability of Cloud Foundry.” Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.

Related Content:

• Cloud Foundry Foundation VideoCast
• Cloud Foundry Bylaws 

Related Blogs:

• ActiveState: The Cloud Foundry Foundation Officially Launches!
• Akamai: Akamai joins Cloud Foundry to support open cloud ecosystem
• Altoros: Cloud Foundry – Why and How it May Shape the World
• Azul Systems: Azul Systems Announces Silver-Level Membership in Cloud Foundry Foundation
• Braintribe: Braintribe is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation
• Canopy: Canopy joins Cloud Foundry Foundation, offers free trial of Canopy Cloud Fabric
• HP: HP and Cloud Foundry® Foundation: Bringing agility and scale to enterprise cloud-native apps
• IBM: Laying the Foundation for the Platform for the People: Cloud Foundry Foundation
• Mendix: Mendix Brings Rapid Application Development to Cloud Foundry Open PaaS
• Pivotal: Governance By Contribution and the Cloud Foundry Foundation
• SAP: Cloud Foundry Foundation launched today

About Cloud Foundry Foundation

The Cloud Foundry Foundation is independent non-profit organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the global industry standard for open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github:https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more visit http://www.Cloud Foundry.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

*IDC, Worldwide Competitive Public Cloud Platform as a Service 2014–2018 Forecast and 2013 Vendor Shares, doc #249893, July 2014. 

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