“Cloud Foundry has exceeded our expectations,” according to Jerry Chen, senior director of cloud and application services at VMware. This is no surprise, as the company’s PaaS option is a major step in getting VMware set up as a leader in the cloud and a front runner in the application development transformation that is currently taking place in the industry.
Unveiled in April, Cloud Foundry includes a Java enterprise programming model known as the Spring Framework, something that VMware acquired along with SpringSource, and the plan for the Foundry is to eventually support several frameworks and programming languages.
Currently, the Cloud Foundry is running in pilot-project form for commercial tenants, but the plan is to also include an Open Source Foundry project which will come under the Apache 2 license.
With four times as many sign-ups as they expected by this point in the release process, the company looks primed to make headway into the cloud development market, and has helped to involve a number of other developers in the open source cloud project.
VMware has always taken the attitude that virtualization, as it stands, is just an appetizer for the full buffet that cloud computing will represent. Further, Cloud Foundry is the first broad-spectrum offering that the company is attempting to provide.
The problem VMware faces, according to companies like research firm Gartner, is a lack of experience in dealing with developers and an unclear role for partners in the cloud. In order to make this cloud offering viable, VMware will have to not only secure momentum from developers but be able to hold on to it.
“Critical mass” is what VMware needs for Cloud Foundry, and hopes deficiencies in current cloud offerings will allow the Foundry to carve out a niche.
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