Cloud Foundry Certification Establishes Portability and Longevity for Cloud Apps in a Multi-Vendor, Multi-Cloud Ecosystem
Summary
- New Cloud Foundry Certification Establishes a Global Industry Standard for PaaS
- CenturyLink, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, Swisscom Among First Industry products to receive Cloud Foundry PaaS Certification
- Cloud Foundry Heralds the 2nd Generation of Cloud Computing; Meets Enterprise Demand for Application Portability in the Cloud
SAN FRANCISCO – December 16, 2015 – Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of the industry standard Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced the Cloud Foundry PaaS Certification program, the industry’s only certification program designed to establish reliable portability across PaaS products in a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment. The Foundation also announced that CenturyLink’s 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,” said Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji. “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.”
This new standard represents a significant leap forward for enterprises that rely on continuous innovation as their primary means of competing effectively in an age of rapid change.
According to ESG Analyst Stephen Hendrick, “These companies often rely on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings in order to quickly build new applications to meet their agile customers’ needs. 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.”
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 Chief Technology Officer Mike Sutten. “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.
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.
Cloud Foundry is collectively developed by 55 member companies including industry leaders in banking (JPMC, BNY Mellon, Citi, Bloomberg, RBC), telecommunications (Verizon, Swisscom, Telstra, CenturyLink, NTT, Huawei, Ericsson), heavy industry (GE), management consulting (Accenture, Atos, Capgemini, Fujitsu, Toshiba), and large-scale computing (VMware, IBM, SAP, HPE, Intel, EMC, Cisco). The platform is portable across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and a range of datacenter infrastructure. Cloud Foundry is proven in production at hundreds of enterprises and and thousands of organizations. Cloud Foundry standardization gives users both freedom of choice and high-velocity innovation.
About Cloud Foundry Foundation
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent non-profit organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the global industry standard for open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github: https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more, visit: https://www.cloudfoundry.org.
Supporting Quotes From Certified Members
CenturyLink
“We leverage Cloud Foundry at many levels of CenturyLink’s platform strategy. Cloud Foundry allows us to modernize legacy tools, automate new managed services and host cloud-native applications for our customers. The Cloud Foundry architecture helps us model the digital transformation characteristics our customers seek to emulate.”
David Shacochis, Vice President of Platform Enablement
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
“There are two enterprise trends we see converging – the move to cloud native application platforms and demand for hybrid cloud solutions. 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.”
Bill Hilf, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HPE Cloud
Huawei
“Being a proud Cloud Foundry Certified provider, Huawei demonstrates the brand integrity and fosters confidence and strength of Huawei’s underlying cloud platform capabilities.”
Jiayong Li, Vice President of Central Software Base Platform
IBM
“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. 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.”
Steve Robinson, General Manager of Cloud Platform Services
VMware
“When VMware created Cloud Foundry, our intent was to build the world’s most powerful continuous innovation platform. 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.”
Rob Mee, CEO of Pivotal (now VMwar)e
SAP
“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 who leverage SAP solutions built with Cloud Foundry to benefit from a continuous stream of cloud-based innovation in an open source environment. This can help lead to application and skill portability across cloud services or on-premises software products that offer Cloud Foundry.”
Dirk Basenach, Senior Vice President, SAP HANA Cloud Platform and Platform Security, SAP SE.
Swisscom
“Cloud Foundry certification allows our customers to execute their hybrid Cloud strategy. Within the Cloud Foundry ecosystem the certification fosters the growth of a vibrant community. Being among the first certified companies in the world, Swisscom underlines once again its commitment and pioneer role in providing agility and state-of-the-art developer experience to corporates.”
Marco Hochstrasser, Head of Swisscom Application Cloud
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Press Contact:
Jil Backstrom
Cloud Foundry Foundation
jbackstrom@cloudfoundry.org
303.913.1650
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