Today’s business environment demands unprecedented levels of agility, as the digital transformation wave changes expectations for the speed and degree of adjustment to customer and market demands. This has led many organizations to seek cloud platforms that can provide development and operational productivity gains along with reliability and portability.

In Azure, we are committed to matching customers with the platforms and tools to meet that challenge. That’s why supporting ecosystem solutions, including a diverse PaaS portfolio, has been an important and long-standing component of our strategy.

Since May 2015, we’ve worked with the Cloud Foundry community to deliver open source Cloud Foundry on Azure, which became GA in November of last year. Through this collaboration and our participation in forums like Cloud Foundry Summit, we’ve seen large and growing interest in Cloud Foundry on Azure from customers looking to accelerate their digital transformation in the cloud.

That’s why, over the last year, we’ve collaborated with Pivotal to deliver an enterprise-proven experience for our joint customers. During that time, we’ve provided a one-click marketplace deployment to simplify getting started, and a rich Azure Service Broker that helps customers leverage Azure services such as Storage, Azure SQL Database, Service Bus, DocumentDB or Redis Cache in their Cloud Foundry applications.

Our joint solution puts strong emphasis on enterprise Java applications as it ships with first-class support for Spring, an application framework well suited to building 12-factor apps. And with a strong, growing global footprint, Azure makes it possible for customers to choose the right location for their Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployments, enabling them to maintain agility while complying with data sovereignty laws and other regulatory requirements.

Of course, this transformation in the way that enterprises build and operate software doesn’t eliminate the possibility that things will occasionally go wrong. That’s why we’ve invested in a joint support workflow, including integrated portal experiences, cross-trained support staff, and ongoing knowledge sharing to help customers resolve issues quickly and effectively.

Today, customers looking at Pivotal Cloud Foundry in Azure will benefit from an agile and fast cloud platform that helps simplify operations and supports many popular application stacks. We’re excited about our joint customer momentum, including Ford, GE, and others, some of which are already running large production workloads.

Microsoft and Pivotal are jointly committed to helping customers transform their businesses with cloud-native applications that leverage the power of the cloud. We’ve been hard at work over the last year to deliver on this commitment and we’re just getting started. We invite you to see the results for yourself today by deploying Pivotal Cloud Foundry with Operations Manager support from Azure Marketplace!