Wheelings & Dealings: Cloud Foundry PaaS Standard Gets $3 Million Infusion from SAP and Rackspace

The cloud computing space just got a massive shot in the arm with the announcement that SAP and Rackspace are committing to the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) standard. The companies are giving the platform a combined $3 million infusion over three years with the goal of making it an enterprise PaaS that will both run clouds as well as create an open governance model to guide the cloud development process.

SAP and Rackspace are in good company, joining project founder Pivotal, a spin-off of EMC and VMware, along with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, NTT, Verizon, CenturyLink and ActiveState. General Electric also owns a $105 million stake in Pivotal, a testament to how influential Cloud Foundry is shaping up to be.

In a nutshell, the open source Cloud Foundry ecosystem strives to enable users to build and run applications that take advantage of giant amounts of data and fast analytics. The end goal is to help companies operate more efficiently and cost effectively as well as offer better levels of customer service.

Rackspace’s involvement with Cloud Foundry creates a distinction between the higher-level PaaS project and the OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) initiative. Of course, most of Cloud Foundry’s supporters are also proponents of OpenStack and have made it a key part of their own cloud computing offerings and environments.

Verizon is working to add PaaS services to the newly revamped Verizon Cloud, using Cloud Foundry as the basis. The company has created an expanded cloud offering including an IaaS platform and cloud-based object storage service.

IBM has invested more than $1 billion in its cloud PaaS offering, codenamed BlueMix, based on Cloud Foundry. The offering combines IBM software with third-party technologies to facilitate rapid development of enterprise applications. Running on the SoftLayer global cloud platform, the BlueMix initiative opens up IBM middleware to the cloud and a giant ecosystem of developers, VARs and partners.