Verizon Underscores Commitment to Cloud, Open Source by Joining Cloud Foundry Board

On the heels of announcing its ramped up Verizon (News - Alert) Cloud offerings, Verizon Enterprise Solutions has joined the Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board. The organization works to increase adoption of the open source Cloud Foundry project for building cloud-based software and applications.

Pivotal, creator of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) ecosystem, has been working to build support from major cloud players. In addition to Verizon, IBM, Intel, NTT (News - Alert) and SAP have helped  build up the project as well as 750 individual contributors.

Verizon has signed the Cloud Foundry community contributor license agreement as part of its commitment to promoting governance, and has also leant engineering resources to the project. The company plans to add enterprise-class PaaS services to the Verizon Cloud, announced last month, and will use Cloud Foundry to build cloud-based solutions.

The expanded cloud offering consists of an IaaS platform and cloud-based object storage service designed to offer the agility and economies of scale of a public cloud along with performance control and enterprise levels of service. The new technologies built using Cloud Foundry will be designed to run on the Verizon IaaS platform. The Verizon Cloud is expected to be in public beta by the fourth quarter of the year, and the company is accepting beta customer sign ups through its website.

"Cloud Foundry has enjoyed tremendous momentum over the past five months as enterprises and developers realize that it truly is the enterprise PaaS of choice," said James Waters, head of product at Pivotal and Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board member. "We look forward to having Verizon's contribution, especially given its considerable talent and expertise, to our board and community." "Pivotal has been great stewards of the Cloud Foundry open source project and by joining the community advisory board and adopting Cloud Foundry for Verizon Cloud, we will make it easy for our clients to fully leverage Verizon Cloud to speed up application delivery and dynamically scale those applications to meet business demand," said John Harrobin, chief marketing officer, Verizon Enterprise Solutions.