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The Cloud Foundry Foundation, steward of the open-source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service technology, has introduced the Cloud Foundry PaaS Certification program, an effort to guarantee reliable portability across PaaS products in a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment.
The foundation also announced that CenturyLink AppFog, HPE Helion Cloud Foundry, Huawei FusionStage, IBM Bluemix, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, SAP HANA Cloud Platform and Swisscom Application Cloud are the first products to receive the Cloud Foundry PaaS Certification.
“Today’s news heralds the next era in cloud computing,” Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji said in a statement. “In the first generation of cloud computing, companies sacrificed portability and choice for speed and cost-efficiency, tying themselves to a single cloud provider, such as Amazon or Google. As we enter the second generation, businesses are committing to the cloud for the long term. As a consequence, they are demanding an industry standard in order to regain control of their applications and reduce complexity. Cloud Foundry Certification gives businesses an open standard for PaaS that delivers both portability and speed.”
Cloud Foundry Certification ensures the application and skill portability across any cloud service or on-premises software product that offers Cloud Foundry. It does this by ensuring all certified products are using the same core Cloud Foundry software. The Cloud Foundry Certification mark is only awarded to products and services that meet the strict technical requirements outlined by the foundation’s technical governing body. Products called “Cloud Foundry” can only use that designation after meeting Cloud Foundry Certification standards. Products must re-certify every year.
“IBM has long recognized the importance of open standards, which will be more important than ever as we continue to progress our vision of a truly open, connected cloud,” Steve Robinson, general manager of Cloud Platform Services at IBM, said in a statement. “By being one of the first Cloud Foundry founding members, IBM is proud to continue the advancement of open standards and use them as the base of our Bluemix platform, which has rapidly grown to become the largest public deployment of this technology and foundational to our overall hybrid cloud solutions.”
Cloud Foundry is used in production at hundreds of enterprises and thousands of organizations. Cloud Foundry standardization gives users freedom of choice and innovation.
“With Cloud Foundry certification of SAP HANA Cloud Platform and our participation in the Cloud Foundry Certification Program, we can enable our customers and partners to leverage a continuous stream of cloud-based innovation in an open-source environment,” said Dirk Basenach, vice president of product management for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform at SAP. “This can help lead to application and skill portability across any cloud service or on-premises software product that offers Cloud Foundry.”
The new certification is a big step forward for enterprises that rely on continuous innovation as their primary means of competing effectively in an age of rapid change.
“These companies often rely on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings in order to quickly build new applications to meet their agile customers’ needs,” said Stephen Hendrick an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “Such broad standardization across vendors, combined with Cloud Foundry’s extensive portability across the public cloud delivers a tremendous amount of utility that is extremely appealing.”
Cloud Foundry Launches PaaS Certification Program
Gartner research reports the PaaS market crossed the $4 billion mark this year, and Wikibon Research predicts it will grow to $68.3 billion by 2026.
“Cloud Foundry Certification gives us a great deal of confidence knowing we’re getting an open-source, standard platform,” said Kaiser Permanente CTO Mike Sutten, in a statement. “We know we’re going to need freedom to choose other suppliers in the future to further enable our commitment to providing high-quality, affordable health care, and it is important that we have a platform on which we can rely over time, regardless of which suppliers we choose.”
“As a founding member, we’ve believed in Cloud Foundry’s vision and their ability to achieve it since its inception,” said BNY Mellon CIO Suresh Kumar. “We are betting big on Cloud Foundry to run our next-generation NEXEN digital ecosystem. We need to be able to run our apps all over the world and that means we need Certified Cloud Foundry to guarantee portability.”
IDC predicts that by 2016 there will be an 11 percent shift of IT budget away from traditional in-house IT delivery toward various versions of cloud computing as a new delivery model. By 2017, 35 percent of new applications will use cloud-based continuous delivery, enabled by faster DevOps life cycles to streamline the rollout of new features for faster business innovation.
“When Pivotal created Cloud Foundry, our intent was to build the world’s most powerful continuous innovation platform,” Rob Mee, CEO of Pivotal, said in a statement. “Since that time, we’ve seen incredible customer adoption and community growth. With today’s certification announcement, we’re one step closer to Cloud Foundry becoming the de facto platform on which enterprise customers will grow their future business.”
Cloud Foundry is collectively owned by 55 member companies including industry leaders in banking (JPMC, BNY Mellon, Citi, Bloomberg and RBC), telecommunications (Verizon, Swisscom, Telstra, CenturyLink, NTT, Huawei and Ericsson), heavy industry (GE), management consulting (Accenture, Atos, Capgemini, Fujitsu and Toshiba), and large-scale computing (Pivotal, IBM, SAP, HPE, Intel, EMC, VMware and Cisco). The platform is portable across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and a range of data center infrastructure.
“There are two enterprise trends we see converging—the move to cloud native application platforms and demand for hybrid cloud solutions,” Bill Hilf, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Cloud at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said in a statement. “HPE has played an important role helping Cloud Foundry become the industry standard for building and running apps across multiple cloud environments. By joining together with other Cloud Foundry Foundation members to support certification, we believe application portability across hybrid clouds will be greatly improved for customers. This is what enterprises want and the Cloud Foundry community is responding.”