It’s been a big week for the cloud ecosystem, with Pivotal announcing that it will establish an independent foundation to oversee Cloud Foundry. Popular among developers for its scalability and relative ease of use, the platform-as-a-service solution was scooped up by VMware as part of the SpringSource acquisition, open sourced two years later and eventually spun off into Pivotal along with a number of other assets.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation, which is set to begin operations this summer, will serve the same purpose as the OpenStack Foundation: give the community a voice in the development of the platform, foster the ecosystem and accelerate adoption. The initiative already has the backing of the EMC federation as well as a number of other prominent cloud vendors, including HP, SAP, Rackspace and IBM.

Big Blue announced its membership in the organization during its landmark Pulse conference in Las Vegas alongside several product updates and the acquisition of Cloudant, a Boston-based provider of NoSQL solutions. One of the main motivations behind the deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, is that the firm’s flagship CouchDB platform is hosted on infrastructure operated by SoftLayer, the managed hosting provider that IBM bought out last year and now constitutes the foundation of its cloud strategy.

Meanwhile, a startup called Elastica emerged from stealth with $6.3 million in Series A funding from Mayfield Fund. Founded by veteran entrepreneur Rehan Jalil, the firm offers a cloud-based management solution that aims to reduce reduce the compliance risks associated with shadow IT by providing a centralized management console for enforcing security policies and monitoring usage trends. Dubbed CloudSOC, the service also enables organizations to “launch targeted investigations against a wealth of information, including historical transactions from their cloud activity,” Jalil told SiliconANGLE.

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