Cloud platform company Pivotal and application engineering outfit Cognizant (News - Alert) are deepening their relationship. This expanded partnership will see Cognizant license Pivotal technologies, get access to Pivotal’s Platform Acceleration Lab, and train its consultants and customers on Pivotal’s platform.

Pivotal sells a cloud-native platform called Cloud Foundry. This platform allows for the rapid deployment of scalable and secure cloud-based applications and infrastructure.

It can be used to create new applications, modernize existing ones, enable microservices, ensure compliance, and address Internet of Things efforts. Pivotal began pushing Cloud Foundry as a way to support legacy (not just new) applications after the EMC (News - Alert)-VMware spinoff brought aboard Rob Mee as CEO in the summer of 2015.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry has passed a $100 million annual bookings run rate. Axel springer, CenturyLink, CoreLogic, GE, Humana, and Philips (News - Alert) are among the users of Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Three of the top five North American financial services institutions use Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Three of the top five global automotive manufacturers use it. Seven of the leading industrial companies use it for their Internet of Things initiatives. And the top four U.S. sports leagues employ Pivotal Cloud Foundry to deliver up to 20 million live notifications a minute on game day.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation, the home to the open source cloud application platform Cloud Foundry, has 16,500 members from 91 cities in 40 countries. Meanwhile, 2,100 developers have contributed code to the effort.

Cloud Foundry is the top container management platform, according to ClearPath Strategies, which published a Cloud Foundry Foundation Global Perception Study in June. The study indicated that 42 percent of those surveyed use Cloud Foundry for container management. Amazon Web services came in second, at 32 percent. It was followed by Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure, at 31 percent. Oracle (ava/Database), Google app Engine, and Force.com (by Salesforce) were next on the list.