IBM made another move in the open-source-cloud space this week by joining Cloud Foundry, the open-source cloud-platform project now overseen by Pivotal, a cloud-platform spin-off owned by EMC, VMware and GE and led by VMware's former CEO Paul Maritz. VMware started the Cloud Foundry project in 2011, but gave the reins to Pivotal after the spin-off was formed earlier this year.

The Armonk, New York-based IT giant will collaborate with Pivotal on further development of Cloud Foundry and have representatives on its advisory board. It will also integrate its cloud architecture with the open-source platform and make the free version of its WebSphere Application Server available through Cloud Foundry.

“IBM’s considerable investment in Cloud Foundry is already producing great results with application-centric cloud offerings, such as making IBM WebSphere Liberty available on Cloud Foundry,” Maritz said in a statement.

The people behind Cloud Foundry are aiming to provide a platform companies can build applications on that works for multiple types of cloud infrastructure and programming models.

This is a second major open-cloud announcement for IBM. The company said in March it would support development of open-source cloud-infrastructure technologies and steep its own cloud architecture in open source.

As part of that announcement, the company also unveiled SmartCloud Orchestrator, a tool that enables administrators to build and manage infrastructure that consists of cloud services by multiple providers.

Daniel Sabbah, general manager of IBM's Next Generation Platforms division, said collaborations like the one with Pivotal open the Cloud Foundry ecosystem for more client innovation. “IBM will incorporate Cloud Foundry into its open cloud architecture, and put its full support behind Cloud Foundry as an open and collaborative platform for cloud application development, as it has done historically for key technologies such as Linux and OpenStack,” he said.

As the open-source project's chief overseer, Pivotal is putting together an advisory board for Cloud Foundry, which will consist of users and vendors, including IBM.

The bulk of Pivotal (62%) belongs to EMC, while VMware (most of which is also EMC property) owns 28%. US conglomerate GE owns the remaining 10%.

Pivotal has not provided much in terms of a specific product road map, but Maritz shared at this year's EMC World in Las Vegas that the company was building an application-development platform that will support a variety of clouds, modern applications built on Node JS, Ruby on Rails, Spring, Python and Hadoop and support big data analytics.

The company expects to launch the first version of the platform, called Pivotal One, in the fourth quarter.

Corrected: This article has been changed to correct an erroneous statement in its earlier version, which said Cloud Foundry had been started by Pivotal. Cloud Foundry was actually started by VMware in 2011. DCD Focus regrets the error.