Piston Cloud has started a new chapter in its partnership with EMC and VMware spin-off Pivotal by setting up an OpenStack environment for the Cloud Foundry development community. The two companies had previously collaborated on an interface that allows the VMware-developed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution to run on top of OpenStack.

Piston hopes that the deployment will enable “large-scale continuous integration testing” of Cloud Foundry and OpenStack. The goal is to accelerate the growth of the former ecosystem by empowering developers to create and “easily accept contributions from anyone.”

Piston Cloud co-founder and CTO Joshua McKenty is joining the Cloud Foundry Advisory Board. The companies will demonstrate the implementation at the upcoming Platform: The Cloud Foundry Conference in Santa Clara.

“We believe that the Cloud Foundry platform has the potential to become a remarkable asset that a broader ecosystem can leverage to enable a new generation of applications for the cloud,” said James Watters, the head of product, marketing and ecosystem at Pivotal. “We are already seeing significant traction from joint customers who want to combine the agile Cloud Foundry platform with OpenStack. We are very grateful for Piston’s investment in both Cloud Foundry’s community infrastructure and Joshua’s participation on the advisory board. We look forward to growing and expanding an open Cloud Foundry community together.”

Pivotal’s decision to adopt OpenStack may undermine VMware, which rightly perceives the project as a threat to its core virtualization business. Chief executive Pat Gelsinger stated in an interview that “we don’t see it having great success coming into the enterprise” because most organizations are heavily invested in their VMware environments, but prominent customers such as PayPal are proving otherwise. The ecommerce giant started rolling out OpenStack in May.