Wednesday saw a flurry of activity in the open-source arena. The day kicked off with a milestone partnership between IBM and EMC-spin off Pivotal to accelerate the development of Cloud Foundry and extend support for third party services.

Foundry, an open source platform-as-a-service solution developed by VMware, will be upgraded to support a wider range of programming languages and frameworks. IBM is already previewing a Foundry-optimized edition of its WebSphere Application Server, one of the many applications that it will be showcasing at the upcoming Cloud Foundry Community Event in Santa Clara.

Open solutions such as Cloud Foundry and OpenStack represent a key pillar of Big Blue’s aggressive public cloud strategy. The company is eager to gain a foothold in this market, but has thus far been very careful not to put all of its eggs in one basket. If Cloudscaling CEO Randy Bias is to believed, that is the best course of action.

Bias, one of the most influential voices in the tech industry, wrote in a blog post that OpenStack has no future in the public cloud. He predicted that this space will be dominated by Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine, and highlighted that OpenStack is “clearly on a trajectory” to secure a dominant position in this segment.

In other open source news, networking behemoth Cisco acquired Sourcefire for $2.7 billion in cash. The cybersecurity firm is best known for Snort, an open intrusion detection system created by its founding CTO. SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto deemed the acquisition an “instant boost” for Cisco, and forecasted that Sourcefire’s solutions will help the vendor climb back to the top of the enterprise security food chain.