Early SiliconANGLE contributor Robert Scoble stopped by  VMware just in time for the Cloud Foundry’s one year anniversary to talk with Tod Nielsen, the virtualization giant’s chief operating officer. The video was posted on his Google+ page.

SiliconANGLE interviewed Nielsen on several occasions at VMWorld 2010, and one particular session was dedicated to how the cloud is picking up momentum in the enterprise (see video below). Two years ago the cloud was second on the CIO’s to-do list and has just started to build up critical mass, in his words, while his company was still developing the “next generation platform.”

Fast-forward to this week, and Nielsen discusses Cloud Foundry – which happens to be open-source on top of everything – after 12 months of very rapid growth. He took the opportunity to expand a bit.

There are several reasons behind Foundry’s popularity among developers, including the abstraction layer that allows it to run on several different types of IaaS architectures. “Our aspiration is to be the Linux for the cloud,” Nielsen says right off the bat, later moving on to 2012’s up and coming trend: big data.

He approached the topic by comparing it with the state of the cloud one year before his Cube appearances. He highlighted that Facebook, Google and practically every major IT company that VMware interacted with has some sort of big data strategy in place, whether aimed at improving internal operations or learning more about a given vendor’s customer base.

Nielsen bounced off from big data back to the open-source movement in the cloud, and how it has impacted Cloud Foundry. Apparently code contributions have exceeded VMware’s contribution to the project by sheer volume.