We all know now that VMware is spinning off its Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) effort to The Pivotal Initiative, along with some other VMware and EMC technologies.
What we still don’t know is what the emergence of this new entity means for the Cloud Foundry ecosystem — the third parties that built their own platforms atop the Cloud Foundry platform. Officially, no one’s saying anything beyond VMware’s opaque blog post announcing the move. Basically, VMware told us all to check back in Q1 2013 for details.
Unofficially the word to these partners, who worry about having to compete more with the Pivotal mothership’s Cloud Foundry commercial release, is: ”remain calm.” Companies that built their PaaSes atop Foundry include Tier 3, Uhuru, AppFog and Activestate.
Macro PaaS picture still bleak
While enterprise uptake of PaaSes in general remains spotty at best — the Cloud Foundry ecosystem has gotten traction of late at least with big IT partners. Two weeks ago, Hewlett-Packard dubbed ActiveState’s Stackato as its PaaS platform while Rackspace is marketing AppFog to its customers. And, this week, Cloud Elements launched a formal systems integration practice around Cloud Foundry.
“With this spinoff I expect to see increased focus and resources for Cloud Foundry,” said Cloud Elements CEO Mark Geene. “If they put Paul Maritz on to head this up, they’re serious about this business.” (Maritz, the former VMware CEO and current EMC chief strategist will, in fact, be CEO of this new effort.)
Of course, the subtext behind the spinoff devoting more resources to the PaaS is that it will also focus more on selling that PaaS to customers which, naturally would mean contention with its PaaS partners who are likewise trying to sell services and support around their own PaaSes. Coopetition lives!
The problem is that most folks — even many PaaS companies — think their market will consolidate and converge around a few key players. Most expect Cloud Foundry and Heroku which Salesforce.com bought two years ago, will remain along with Microsoft Windows Azure in the Windows and .Net realm, but many smaller more niche players will get acquired or fade away. So coopetition may live on but with fewer actual competitors.
The big question underlying all of this is whether this flurry of vendor action will lead to actual adoption by business customers. You can bet one thing — winning real customers was the primary motivation behind the Pivotal Initiative from the get go.
Photo courtesy by Flickr user fontplaydotcom
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