Pivotal Adds Mobile To Cloud Foundry PlatformPivotal Adds Mobile To Cloud Foundry Platform

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Pivotal, the big data and analysis company that was spun off from VMware and EMC, has expanded its Cloud Foundry platform to include specialized mobile services.

Pivotal is attempting to supply a leading development platform through the Cloud Foundry platform as a service. Cloud Foundry Mobile Services will provide a public API gateway for independent mobile developers to use; included will be a data synching service and push notification services that meet enterprise security requirements, Pivotal spokesmen said.

Cloud Foundry has become an independent open source project with its own foundation and board of directors, but Pivotal remains the only large vendor that makes a product from Cloud Foundry open source code, Pivotal CF. Pivotal is adding the mobile services to its CF product, which can be installed on-premises as an enterprise platform.

"Pivotal has combined its deep data and mobile experience... to bring enterprises the speed they need to disrupt with software," said James Watters, Pivotal's VP of product and ecosystems for Cloud Foundry. As smartphones become the computing device for more consumers, companies want to provide applications that appeal to that market and update the apps frequently. That puts a heavy set of requirements on any platform that is supporting the development of mobile apps, he said in the announcement.

[Want to learn more about the emergence of a Cloud Foundry Foundation? Read Cloud Crossroads: Which Way PaaS?]

The data synchronization service in CF Mobile Services is based on an API that can allow a mobile app to access multiple types of data storage. That makes it easier for developers to call for data inside an enterprise for which they're building a mobile app.

The push notifications are geared to integrate with enterprise services behind the firewall, such as Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange, while providing logging and tracking of activity.

An API Gateway consolidates the various APIs needed by mobile application to access backend services into a single interface, making it easier for developers to call those services, optimizing application performance for end users.

Much of Pivotal's ability to add the mobile services comes from its Xtreme Labs acquisition in October last year for $65 million. Xtreme was dubbed "an elite mobile development shop" at the time by the investment website, VentureBeat.com.

Pivotal CF is meant to serve not only as a one-time development platform for mobile apps but as a rapid update and continuous delivery service of new feature code for the apps.

Pivotal previously announced an expansion of Pivotal CF data services at the Cloud Foundry Summit in San Francisco in June. The new mobile services work with those data services.

Cloud Foundry was formerly an open source project sponsored by VMware and its parent company, EMC. But it gained sufficient support from a variety of companies, such as Rackspace, IBM, Canonical, and SAP, last March to marshal the financing and developer support for a foundation and governing board. It competes with Google App Engine, a Python and Java PaaS system, Red Hat's OpenShift, and such PaaS platforms as Engine Yard and Salesforce.com's Heroku.

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