Verizon has joined the advisory board for Cloud Foundry, the open source Platform-as-a-Service project, started by VMware and now overseen by Pivotal, a spin-off owned by EMC and GE and led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz. Pivotal announced a commercial release of Cloud Foundry Tuesday.

Joining the open-source project and the board that oversees it is part of Verizon’s plan to add PaaS offerings to its new cloud platform. Its clients will be able to use Cloud Foundry to build cloud-based software and applications.

John Harrobin, chief marketing officer for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, said, “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.”

Verizon has signed the Cloud Foundry community contributor license agreement and is working with other contributors to drive open governance. The company has also committed engineering resources to the open source project.

Verizon has been developing an ecosystem of technologies that will be specifically built to run on its new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform. The cloud platform was introduced in early October and will be available in public beta in the fourth quarter of 2013.