Virtualization giant VMware announced that it has expanded support for Cloud Foundry, its open-source PaaS offering.  As a part of a new partnership with Dell, the latter’s services business will integrate the beta platform-as-a-service solution with Ubuntu Linux, according to VMware VP Jerry Chen.  enStratus Networks, a developer of cloud management platforms, also said it has added supported for Cloud Foundry.

Chen also noted in an interview to Bloomberg that Microsoft is one of his company’s biggest competitors in this space:

“Microsoft may be the toughest adversary in wooing large corporate customers, Chen said. Because of Microsoft’s long history with business customers and its work on the .Net language, “they’re the one we worry about most in competing for enterprise customers,” he said.

VMware has been investing a lot in developing and fleshing out its emerging PaaS offering. The company integrated the open RabbitMQ internal messaging engine it acquired a year ago as a part of the buyout of Rabbit Technologies, evident in an update to Cloud Foundry last week.  This will enable Foundry to support add-on services, which represent the primary way VMware plans on monetizing the platform.

Looking back, the virtualization solutions provider has a history of taking aggressive steps to stay ahead of the competition, though one if its most recent moves did not settle that well with the company’s clients.  The announcement of vShpere 5 came along with a rise in licensing fees for the majority of its customers, which in turn drove a lot of them into looking at more affordable alternatives, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V. The company upped its vRam allotment from 30 percent to 100 percent and changed its licensing model, but it triggered an outcry nevertheless.

Moving back to Cloud Foundry, it’s also important a look from the partner’s point of view. Dell is belongs to a list of consumer hardware giants, namley itself and HP, that are moving beyond this low-margin market in light of shrinking PC demand to the hugher margin enterprise services space. This is part of the reason Dell is expecting to see growth in the next quarter.