SANTA CLARA, California — Cloud company Virtustream teamed up with Pivotal to provide a managed enterprise cloud service for customers building and deploying applications with Pivotal’s cloud native platform, Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF).

The companies announced the collaboration at this week’s Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley. They say PCF, running on Virtustream’s enterprise-class cloud, gives companies an alternative to general purpose public cloud offerings.

“Designed as a single instance hosted service, the new offering enables customers to build and deploy legacy and cloud-native apps in hybrid cloud environments,” while offloading infrastructure, platform deployment, and management responsibilities to Virtustream, said Matt Theurer, senior vice president of product management at Virtustream.

Virtustream managing the service makes is easier for companies to build and deploy cloud-native applications, said James Watters, senior vice president of Pivotal’s product and business development organizations. It will appeal to businesses with the mindset “we think your developer-ready platform is the best of breed and we just want to procure it as a fully-managed cloud,” he said.

Pivotal launched version 1.10 of the platform last month. It has a number of new features including allowing users to put all of their applications into one Cloud Foundry environment and create policies for those applications.

The micro-VM is Virtustream’s patented cloud resource management technology.

“It’s a standardized, fine-grained bundle of the most critical computing resources needed to run applications — including measurements of CPU, memory, IOPS [input/output operations per second], and networking bandwidth,” Theurer wrote in an email. “At its most basic level, the micro-VM enables customers to pay only for their amount of cloud computing usage as opposed to allocated hours. Most cloud computing providers determine charges based on the maximum rated capacity of all virtual machines — the equivalent of an electricity provider charging based on the rated capacity of each appliance in a home, and not for the actual power consumption. It’s a competitive differentiator for Virtustream.”

Dell Technologies owns Virtustream and and is an investor in Pivotal. During its earnings calls with investors last week, Dell Technologies said it saw growing customer interest in Virtustream’s cloud during the first quarter and that demand for mission-critical applications increased by about 100 percent.

Dell Technologies’ portfolio of brands and services can benefit customers of the new Virtustream-PCF managed service, Theurer said.

“The offering can integrate with Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC) to provide a single source native hybrid cloud solution from Dell Technologies,” he explained. “Customers can easily manage their hybrid cloud implementation with the new Virtustream managed Pivotal service all in one, integrated solution.”