IBM and EMC spin-off Pivotal this morning announced an alliance to develop the Cloud Foundry platform and open source project. They also announced that they will collaborate on the technology that enables programming languages or frameworks to be deployed on the Cloud Foundry platform. IBM is already previewing WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core, a lightweight version of the WebSphere Application Server, running on Cloud Foundry. And they announced a co-hosted Cloud Foundry Community Event September 8-9 in Santa Clara, California.

On SiliconAngle.TV’s Morning Newsdesk show this morning Wikibon Analyst and Principal Research Contributor Stuart Miniman said this was a win for both sides (see below). “Pivotal gets a partner who has a lot of money, a lot of resources in its services arm to drive some of these solutions.” On the other side, “Open source solutions are critical to what IBM is doing…. Ambuj Goyal, who drives many of these initiatives, says IBM will differentiate based on their execution, not on locking customers in.”

The immediate goal of the alliance is to establish an open governance model for the Cloud Foundry community, but the broader implications of a formal agreement between IBM and an EMC subsidiary are potentially huge. Cloud Foundry is an interoperable Platform-as-a-Service framework that is one of Pivotal’s main products. It gives users the freedom to choose their cloud infrastructure, application programming models, and cloud applications.

IBM brings a portfolio of 9,000 cloud clients, many potential Cloud Foundry users, to the table. It is seeing an increasing appetite for cloud-based mobile, social, and analytics applications from line-of-business executives, and IBM has been moving aggressively to build its capabilities and presence in this area with acquisitions and announcements of new customers s well as a major investment in WebSphere. It argues that CIOs need an open, vibrant development platform to meet that demand and avoid vendor lock-in, and it sees Cloud Foundry as that platform. Cloud Foundry will enable those IBM clients to rapidly build, deploy, and manage cloud applications in a more agile, scalable manner, with confidence.

Combining Cloud Foundry with the WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core combines the robustness of the WebSphere platform with the innovation of the emerging Cloud Foundry cloud architecture for developers, IBM says. The Cloud Foundry Community event will include presentations by the thought leaders behind Cloud Foundry and presentations by companies using Cloud Foundry to build a new class of dynamic, agile, elastic, and intelligent application platform.

Stay in touch here for more information over the next weeks.