Cloud Foundry is doing for platform as a service (PaaS) what OpenStack did for infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Just as the forming of the OpenStack Foundation a couple of years ago was meant to accelerate the development and usage of the open source IaaS software, the newly-launched Cloud Foundry Foundation is meant to accomplish similar things for the open source PaaS offering.

The new organization officially launched this week with a roster of more than 40 vendors aboard for the ride. Included in that list are EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware. The Cloud Foundry Foundation will be managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and will operate under an open governance system created by a team of founding members.

“The industry has been in need of an OpenStack equivalent for the unique characteristics of PaaS, and Cloud Foundry Foundation has managed to rally broad participation among key application infrastructure players in short order,” said Charlotte Dunlap, senior analyst at Current Analysis, in a prepared statement released by Cloud Foundry Foundation. “The formalization of Cloud Foundry as an industry standard will only help spur further PaaS adoption by providing additional reassurance to enterprises which are looking to speed app development and avoid vendor lock-in.”

According to the organization, Cloud Foundry has experience a 36 percent increase in community contributions and more than 1,700 pull requests in the last year. Additionally, Cloud Foundry is being used in a variety of commercial PaaS offerings, including Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, HP Helion and Canopy Cloud Fabric.

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As it gets going as an official open source organization, the Cloud Foundry Foundation is implementing a new approach to open source development dubbed Dojo. The organization noted that Dojo offers a fast track for commit rights, which it stated often take more than a year to gain in a major project. Cloud Foundry Foundation seems intent on reducing that time.

Additionally, the organization plans to introduce a certification program in 2015 “to ensure consistency and compatibility across Cloud Foundry-branded products and services.”

“Community participation accelerates concepts to maturity, and is increasingly being adopted as a way to deliver open cloud-based solutions to customers,” said Larry Carvalho, PaaS research manager at IDC, in a prepared statement. “The announcement of the Cloud Foundry Foundation aims to improve transparency and speed technical innovation of the open source platform.”