Pivotal, which helps companies build software to run in public and private clouds, today announced a new service to deploy applications in software “containers” to run on Google Inc.’s cloud service and on VMware Inc.’s vSphere suite of virtualization services.

The new Pivotal Container Service will enable companies to create software containers, which wrap applications in a software bundle so they can run easily across public clouds and so-called private clouds inside data centers, using the Google-developed open-source container manager Kubernetes. It’s intended to help companies migrate applications to both the Google Cloud Platform and VMware’s Vsphere suite of virtualization technologies that emulate a computer system in software for more efficient use of servers in corporate data centers.

The service was due to be announced this morning at VMware’s VMworld conference for customers and partners in Las Vegas. Pivotal and VMware are subsidiaries of Dell following the computer giant’s huge acquisition of storage giant EMC Corp. last year.

Essentially, Pivotal Container Service is a commercial version of Kubo, an open-source project developed by Google and Pivotal starting last November. James Watters (pictured), senior vice president of products for Pivotal, said in an interview that to date, Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, an open-source cloud development platform originally created by VMware, hasn’t offered containers as a service to date for tasks such as running the open-source data processing engine Apache Spark.

Paul Fazzone, general manager of cloud native applications at VMware, added that one of the advantages of the new service will be the ability to create containers quickly and easily instead of having to provision physical servers for them in a data center. “Instead of building a bunch of McMansions, you’re getting a hotel environment,” he told SiliconANGLE.

Despite the rapid rise in popularity of open-source Kubernetes, most large enterprises are looking for a commercially supported service, said International Data Corp. research manager Gary Chen, and that’s what the Pivotal service is intended to provide.

The service will be generally available in the fourth quarter for enterprises as a freestanding product sold directly by both Pivotal and VMware that can integrate with Cloud Foundry and VMware’s software-defined data center infrastructure.

VMware will contribute engineering help and team up with Pivotal and Google to develop Kubo. For its part, Google said it will maintain compatibility between the Pivotal service and Google’s own container engine, a managed service that uses the latest release of Kubernetes. “We see a powerful container ecosystem emerging,” Sam Ramji, vice president of product management for developer platforms at Google Cloud, said during a Tuesday morning keynote at VMworld. But he said it depends on a way for companies to run their applications on private and multiple public clouds the same way, something that requires that constant compatibility.

Pivotal recently said revenue from Cloud Foundry rose 130 percent last year, to $270 million, making it the key driver of its business. Dell owns a bit over 50 percent of Pivotal, the rest split among General Electric Co., Ford Motor Co., Microsoft Corp. and VMware. According to some reports, Pivotal, valued at more than $3 billion, is considering an initial public offering of shares by the middle of next year.

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