Cloud Foundry may be an open platform for driving Platform as a Service (PaaS), but it is still really driven by its creator, Pivotal, itself a spinoff from EMC and its subsidiary VMware.
But in the spirit of openness and market share, Pivotal is looking for partners.
It recently scooped up two big ones.
Last week, IBM joined its Cloud Foundry Advisory Board. Today Savvis, itself owned by CenturyLink, joined the group as well.
Savvis has some serious VMware and Cloud Foundry chops, which should come in handy. The company recently delivered Savvis Cloud Data Center, a new service based on Cisco's Unified Data Center and VMware vCloud Director 5.1 that supports hybrid clouds.
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Earlier this summer Savvis bought AppFog, a PaaS platform that supports Cloud Foundry. This clearly gives Savvis an interest in driving Cloud Foundry technology forward, and broadening its reach so customers demand it.
So what exactly is Cloud Foundry? Let’s let the horse’s mouth answer that one. “Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances. Cloud Foundry is made available by Pivotal and partners,” the group said.
The Savvis move got a ringing endorsement from former VMware CEO Paul Maritz who now runs Pivotal. “Cloud Foundry is fast becoming the preeminent open source cloud-independent Platform-as-a-Service,” said Maritz. “We are excited to expand our community advisory board today through the addition of Savvis and look forward to the collaboration ahead.”
Just having Maritz drive Pivotal is a big deal. Maritz was “pivotal” in Microsoft’s early growth and broadened VMware’s toolset into a true cloud platform.
Savvis isn’t just advising; it is contributing technology to the open PaaS platform such as new features, design and bug fixes.
Many of these contributions are expected from the AppFog team. “AppFog has been an active participant in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem since its inception,” said Lucas Carlson, the founder of AppFog who currently serves as vice president of cloud evangelism at Savvis. “Now as part of CenturyLink, we have an exciting opportunity to expand our participation in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem while promoting the adoption of open-source standards to a wider developer base.”
The AppFog acquisition and the Cloud Foundry partnership speak to the growing power of PaaS.
“We see strong interest among our clients for private PaaS solutions and believe that Cloud Foundry offers a unique, open-source solution to meet these requirements,” noted Andrew Higginbotham, Savvis chief technology officer.
More than just PaaS
So what else besides PaaS is Savvis all about these days? A lot apparently. “Savvis provides a robust range of managed services across our hosting products. We provide IT strategy, Data center migration and cloud migration consulting for small, lightweight and large enterprise engagements. Cloud Data Center is one of the options for an end state for these consulting engagements, should the answer be a Savvis hosted solution,” a spokesperson explained. “We also provide Operating Systems monitoring and management for our Cloud (including Cloud Data Center) and traditional hosted managed services. This goes beyond the reactive service of having ‘experts standing by 24x7.’ Our full OS management includes proactive monitoring based on standard or customer requested metrics. This management layer extends to simple and complex storage, network and security services as well.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
