The Cloud Foundry Foundation, established in February, will get a new marquee name Tuesday with Intel coming aboard as a Platinum member.
Other companies, including Akamai, Fujitsu, Hortonworks, Mendix, SAS and others also joined the effort to push Cloud Foundry as an open framework for cross-cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS).
If it achieves its goals a business customer could “write an app once and run it in many places with lots of services,” said Leo Spiegel, SVP of strategy and corporate development at Pivotal, the company behind the commercial PivotalCF version of the PaaS. Those “many places” would include PivotalCF, or IBM BlueMix or HP Helion or whatever iteration of Cloud Foundry it deems most appropriate. That would alleviate corporate concerns of platform or vendor lock-in but is also a tall order.
Another (unspoken) part of the foundation’s aim is to show that Cloud Foundry is not under the control of one vendor — Pivotal or its parent company VMware — so bringing in these big names and their code contributions is a plus. But then again, all those vendors want to wring competitive advantage out of Cloud Foundry, which is at odds with providing customers an easy offramp to someone else’s version of the PaaS.
To expedite logistics, the Cloud Foundry leadership signed the Linux Foundation to provide staffing, legal assistance and help with events.
“Why recreate things that exist?” Spiegel asked. “We raised plus or minus $6 million a year — we want to use that cost-effectively and not hire separate legal and event teams that are already in place.”
(As reported on https://gigaom.com/2014/12/08/cloud-foundry-foundation-brings-in-reinforcements/)