VMware’s launch of Cloud Foundry has put them in direct competition with some of their service provider partners, just weeks after attempting to reassure them that VMware was not a service provider.

Cloudfoundry.com, a complete hosted PaaS environment managed by VMware directly, in a similar vein to Google App Engine, Heroku, and others. Just weeks ago, when VMware took over the running of Mozy from their parent company EMC, VMware were giving out the message “VMware are not a service provider and not competing with our service provider partners”, but with cloudfoundry.com, the level of competition is pretty clear.

In the backend software powering the service, branded as cloudfoundry.org, “The open platform as a service project”, VMware have made a powerful move packaging various open-source technologies into a ready to build platform that lets service providers build their own PaaS offerings, pretty much the area that VMware already worked – providing the tools to let others build the finished offering to customers. Packaging open source products has proven to be a very effective business model for Red Hat, amongst others, so this isn’t a case of “giving up” on selling software by VMware.

While I’m sure VMware don’t want to upset their service provider partners, cloudfoundry.com is obviously going to put a few noses out of joint, which makes me ask, why VMware went down this route.

The only answer I’ve come up with so far is that their existing partners were simply too slow and didn’t have the same level of commitment to VMware’s vision of the cloud. When VMware launched vCloud Express, I’m sure they were hoping for rapid adoption across a huge range of service providers, but it simply didn’t happen. While there are vCloud providers, you’re unlikely to stumble upon one when you’re looking for hosting.

With cloudfoundry.com, VMware ensuring that there will be a least one committed provider of their platform, but will it encourage other service providers to join in, or will they continue to hold back, struggling to decide between VMware’s offerings and building their own stack on alternatives like Xen Cloud Platform, and Openstack?