Cloud Foundry Foundation Names CEO update from February 2015

Cloud Foundry Foundation has named Sam Ramji its CEO. The foundation is the independent governing body of the open source Platform-as-a-Service project. Nine new inaugural board members were added as well.

The governing body is fairly young but active, hitting 40 member companies last December. Meetups organized by the community are up 350 percent in the last year.

Pivotal, an EMC and VMware spin-off company and original overseer of the project, decided to create the independent foundation to help grow the ecosystem and establish a formal open governance model.

Ramji is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley and Seattle technology scenes and has no ties to any of the foundation’s current member companies. This is an important factor in keeping the balance of power from tipping toward any one company’s favor, the very reason for the foundation’s creation.

"Our goal is to run cloudfoundry.org with the speed and agility of a startup, not a traditional consortium," said Ramji in a release. "This will help us continue the rapid growth and momentum Cloud Foundry has achieved to date."

Some notches on Ramji’s belt include leading strategy for API powerhouse Apigee, designing and leading Microsoft's open source strategy, and driving product strategy for the BEA WebLogic Integration.

Cloud Foundry is a popular open source PaaS heavily used in numerous fairly new commercial PaaS offerings, such as Pivotal CF, IBM Bluemix, and HP Helion.

"Cloud Foundry is quickly becoming the enterprise platform of choice for deploying and operating applications in the cloud," Ramji said. "Major corporations on the supply and demand sides of the cloud market are putting significant resources behind this community-built platform. They're doing so because they know they can commit to Cloud Foundry as their long-term cloud platform with confidence."

A member of multiple industry advisory boards, Ramji is board secretary of Outercurve Foundation, a non-profit initially created by Microsoft as CodePlex Foundation. Outercurve’s goal is enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities. The named was changed to Outercurve to drive wider participation and contribution. It now supports the wider Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.

Outercurve’s evolution is similar to what’s occurring with Cloud Foundry. The foundation wants to drive wider open source participation after a Cloud Foundry charge mostly led by Pivotal.

“The Cloud Foundry project was already keen on keeping some common ground between CF distributions with the notion of ‘core' CF,” said Ovum senior analyst Laurent Lachal via email. “It seems to want to strengthen the approach [with the foundation].”

The nine new inaugural board members added are: