IBM, Pivotal Collaborate to Develop Open Cloud Foundry Platform

IBM may have some more “‘splainin’ to do” regarding its cloud revenue numbers, but in the mean time, Big Blue is moving forward, announcing a collaboration with application and data infrastructure software developer Pivotal to further develop Cloud Foundry — Pivotal’s platform and open source project.

IBM said the goal of this joint effort is for both companies to work with the community to further develop the Cloud Foundry platform and establish an open governance model for Cloud Foundry.

To understand community needs, Pivotal will establish a community advisory board of Cloud Foundry users and vendors, which, of course, would include IBM.

The company added that having an open Cloud Foundry platform enables clients to build, deploy and manage cloud applications in a more agile and scalable manner.

IBM Next Generation Platforms General Manager Daniel Sabbah said in his prepared remarks that Cloud Foundry has the potential to transform business, and this collaboration between the two companies will create greater client innovation.

“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,” he said.

Cloud Foundry was designed as a platform as a service (PaaS) to provide users with the freedom of choice across cloud infrastructure and application programming models and cloud applications.

During an earnings call last week, IBM said its cloud revenues grew more than 70 percent in the first half of 2013, but avoided a discussion of actual dollar amounts.