Pivotal Acquires CloudCredo, Leading European Cloud Foundry Consultancy
Closing out a year in which Cloud Foundry stormed across the enterprise landscape, Pivotal, the creator of the open-source development platform, on Monday revealed its acquisition of CloudCredo, a European consultancy that's a star in the Cloud Foundry channel.
CloudCredo, based in London, has found success over the past three years in delivering the Platform-as-a-Service technology to digital businesses looking to speed software turnarounds.
With the acquisition, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Pivotal, a spinoff of EMC and VMware, boosts its engagement capabilities -- especially throughout Europe -- and gains exclusivity with CloudCredo's customer base.
CloudCredo has been bringing Cloud Foundry to market ever since Pivotal released the platform in 2011. While never faltering as a close partner -- once even finding a home at the software company's London offices -- CloudCredo has also done deals selling distributions from rival vendors who joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation that Pivotal created.
The acquisition comes as Cloud Foundry makes major inroads into the enterprise, and rapid adoption heats competition between name-brand foundation members -- IBM has Bluemix, and other notables also part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SAP, are bringing to market versions of the technology.
"We built the foundation, put the technology in the foundation, knowing we would create competitors," said Leo Spiegel, Pivotal's senior vice president of strategy and corporate development. "But we wanted to grow the market as large as we could and make sure customers had choice."
CloudCredo's hands-on expertise with the PaaS technology and the esteem it has won from within the community make the company more than a mere consultant, Spiegel told CRN.
"They really are a thought leader in the Cloud Foundry space, and obviously with the Pivotal version," he said.
The 25-strong CloudCredo team, led by CEO Colin Humphreys, has executed some of Pivotal's largest and most complex implementations, he said. The company is also a well-respected contributor to the project.
Pivotal plans to integrate into its distribution some of the capabilities CloudCredo has developed for the platform, Spiegel told CRN.
The acquisition will help Pivotal deliver its product in Europe as that business gains steam, he said.
"They're good at operationalizing, installing and managing large Cloud Foundry installations," Spiegel said of CloudCredo. "In many ways, I feel like a distant relative has come home."
Nic Williams, founder and CEO of Stark & Wayne, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based DevOps consultancy specializing in Cloud Foundry projects, told CRN the deal will help Pivotal hold back competitors looking to muscle their way in on the technology Pivotal developed and then open-sourced.
The contributions from the CloudCredo team will ramp up Pivotal Cloud Foundry's success not only in Europe, but as the platform scales globally, Williams said.
Williams, who started his practice around the same time as CloudCredo and is a friend of that company's founders, said their influence on the project, both as consultants and developers, will be amplified inside Pivotal.
"For the sake of Cloud Foundry, I think this is pretty fantastic, because Colin [Humphreys] is going to have a senior role in the biggest company in the Cloud Foundry space," Williams told CRN.
The acquisition comes with the added benefit of securing for Pivotal a base of customers that might have been divided among various competitors just as the market was exploding, Williams said.
"There's 500 Fortune 500 companies and every single one of them in the next five years is going to be running Cloud Foundry," Williams predicted.
That ambitious projection is based on the changing nature of enterprise IT.
"Everything's about software," Williams told CRN. "How fast can you develop, how fast you can get to market, is the No. 1 factor."
PUBLISHED DEC. 21, 2015