The company is pitching the platform for both legacy vSphere applications already running in company data centers  and for brand new applications designed from the ground up.  VMware execs up to and including CEO Pat Gelsinger promised “seamless” interoperability between on-premises implementation and vCloud Hybrid Services.

They promised it will let customers move data from on-premise infrastructure to public clouds on Layer 2 or Layer 3 networks and create the same virtual-networking infrastructure like load balancers and firewalls. Management will happen all inside current VMware software tools. Managing and moving virtual machines will be possible inside vSphere through a free-plugin. The idea is to help customers move existing applications around and develop new applications on the public cloud. Some customers will want to run specified applications on the public cloud and keep key data on premises, said Gelsinger, who will be a featured speaker at GigaOM Structure next month.

Bill Fathers, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud services, described vCloud Hybrid Service as the easiest public cloud to adopt. It will be available through current partners, so licensing won’t be different. And customers can get support for the vCloud Hybrid Service from VMware, just as they can for other services.

Partners that endorsed the platform included  Tibco, Microsoft, SAP, Puppet Labs (see disclosure) and Pivotal, VMware’s step-brother that is co-owned by VMware and parent company EMC. VMware  holds a significant stake in Puppet. “VMware will be the first and only cloud provider to provide SAP software, including HANA, as a subscription service on premise and in the cloud,” Fathers said.

The vCloud Hybrid Service actually has two flavors: a Dedicated Cloud mode has “physically isolated and reserved compute resources” for predictable workloads and a Virtual Private Cloud for seasonal workloads that require greater elasticity but are multitenant in nature. The former service will start at 13 cents an hour for a 1 GB virtual machine with a single processor on an annual basis, while the latter will start at 4.5 cents an hour on a monthly basis. But those prices will come as year-long licenses. Fathers said he expects customers to use both in parallel.

To provide the infrastructure for the vCloud Hybrid Service in the United States, VMware will pull from infrastructure in Santa Clara, Calif.; Las Vegas; Dallas; and Sterling, Va. Fathers said the plan is for “an asset-light model” in which the facilities in those cities are “third-party data centers.”

Beta customer, Julio Sobral, senior vice president of post production for Fox Broadcasting, said the movement of certain applications to VMware’s public cloud, particularly collaboration tools for dispersed employees, had, in fact, been “seamless.”

Other beta customers include the state of Michigan, the city of Melrose, Mass.; and Planview. The question is how many of VMware’s roughly 500,000 customers will move onto the service too, rather than keep using IaaS providers such as Amazon (a amzn) Web Services for certain applications, as some customers have.

There could also be friction with existing VMware cloud partners. They have been underwhelmed by the offering and the service provider partners not selected to host the offering now feel they are competing with their supplier, as my colleague Barb Darrow has noted.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

This story was updated Wednesday with corrected pricing charts from VMware. The company originally posted to its website different pricing models for storage and bandwidth. Additionally, a sentence about the lack of information about storage and network prices was removed.

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As can be expected with that sort of customer base, France Telecom’s business services arm is highlighting global business continuity support as the main reason for choosing its IaaS over the likes of Amazon or Rackspace. As the company’s international cloud chief, Chris McKay, told me, configurability is also a selling point.

“There are no small, medium or large instances. You pay for what you use, but you don’t have to pay for steps in instances,” McKay said.

Regarding competition from other telcos, particularly others from Europe such as BT and Deutsche Telekom, he stressed the “industrialized” nature of Orange’s offering – “we provide a catalog for the customer which has granularity of managed services which the customer can choose, from the OS to middleware to applications” – and the fact that Orange manages its own cloud data centers around the world rather than turning to outsourcing in certain locations.

Orange already has around 500 customers for Flexible Computing, which allows both self-managed and fully managed usage. The platform is based on in-house technology, but McKay said Orange was also looking at “other avenues”.

“Right now we’re carrying out studies,” he said. “[We will try] possibly OpenStack and a few others for an internal cloud solution at France Telecom in the next four months, where we’re going to evaluate what the right direction is for the future.”

According to an Orange Business Services statement on the North American and Asian expansion, the company is on track to rake in €500 million ($644 million) in cloud revenues in 2015. It managed €113 million in 2012, which was a third up on the year before.

The big European telcos are certainly pushing hard when it comes to the cloud, and this will no doubt be a topic for discussion at our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September.

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The theory behind tools like these is basically this: sure, public cloud computing is billed as cheap, but too often it turns into a wasteland of dormant instances and other fallow resources. So as inexpensive as it can be, it’s not necessarily efficient or as cheap as it could be. Companies like Newvem, Cloudability, Cloudyn, CloudVertical et al say they can help you optimize all that and save more.

Newvem for Windows Azure covers many of the same core usage and cost metrics as the AWS version. A “heat map” helps users visualize their workloads as they move from on-premise implementations to the cloud, according to Newvem VP of marketing Cameron Peron. The free beta is available now to all Azure users. Newvem’s AWS version started out free as well, and a base level of capabilities remain free, but as of late last year, the company started charging for higher-level services.

Newvem said it sees Azure — which launched its AWS-like Infrastructure-as-a-Service  capabilities last month — gaining traction.

“The size of the Azure installed base is probably one of [Microsoft's] best-kept secrets,” Peron noted. Well, not that secret since Microsoft recently said Azure is a $1 billion-a-year business – a claim that some find difficult to swallow. Newvem would not comment when asked if Microsoft helped fund its Azure tool, but given that Microsoft wants to build the Azure ecosystem and compete better with AWS (as well as the spanking new Google Compute Engine), I’d say it’s a safe bet.

It’s also true that companies like Newvem, which built services around AWS, have been perplexed to see AWS adding richer and deeper monitoring and management services like Trusted Advisor. Given that, it makes sense that these companies offer multi-cloud capabilities.

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Microsoft’s Chicago data center is one of eight worldwide.

While he did not characterize Azure IaaS as an “Amazon killer,” Azure GM Bill Hilf did say Microsoft will match AWS on price for any of its base-level infrastructure — storage, compute instances, etc. — continuing a price war that flared last November when AWS, Google and Microsoft traded price cuts on their respective cloud storage offerings.

And, Azure IaaS pricing will be uniform across all geographies and data centers. Microsoft runs 8 data centers worldwide, 4 in the U.S., 2 in Europe and 2 in Asia. This is a pointed response to AWS, which relies heavily on its aging-but-humongous U.S. East data center farm in Ashburn, Virg. Many AWS services debut there and prices for U.S. East services are often lower than the same services originating in other AWS regions. “Many customers architect their applications in really weird ways to take advantage of that pricing,” Hilf said. U.S east is also the epicenter for most of the AWS outages over the past year or so.

And before you write off Azure as too late to matter, consider this: For the many companies that run Windows applications and may want to move them betwixt and between a public cloud and their own Windows-centric server rooms, Azure may be a really smart choice. In the run up to this news Microsoft announced Active Directory for Azure  last week.

PaaS priority hurt Azure

Microsoft’s problem is that it zigged when it probably should have zagged 3 years ago when it rolled out Azure as a full Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It was a great idea in theory, but by then developers — especially those in startups — were already flocking to AWS and its easy-to-spin-up-and-pay-for infrastructure.

That interest started to spread to bigger, more established businesses or departments within enterprises where developers loved the idea of being able to quickly build their own sandbox on AWS without IT interference. Fair or not, the perception soon became that Azure was a development and deployment platform for old-world Windows and .Net applications. It was deep and rich, but it was attacking a moribund market.

Ironically, those old-school Windows shops could now be Azure’s saving grace. The majority of legacy enterprise applications run on Windows and many of those enterprises are evaluating cloud deployments, although not many of them are wild about moving enterprise applications to a public cloud. Hilf’s argument is that since Azure’s underpinnings mirror those of Windows Server 2012 shops, applications can run on premises or in the cloud and partially in either.

Google Compute Engine, aka the wild card cloud

For many developers, the great unknown here is what impact Google Compute Engine will have when it becomes widely available. I would bet that might happen at Google I/O  next month, but who knows, Google may want to counter program this Azure news. Plus the OpenStack Summit is this week with lots of news coming out of companies including Rackspace, IBM, HP and others —  which hope to combat with AWS with OpenStack-based public clouds.

But many think that Google, by virtue of its sheer scale, will be the cloud to watch vis-a-vis Amazon Web Services.

The other issue is whether Amazon, which is by all accounts the world’s largest public cloud provider, can maintain the advantages of being first to market with its gigantic cloud and whether it can attract enterprise accounts with higher-end services like RedShift data warehousing.

AWS has rolled out hundreds of services and features since launching in 2006 — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos  put the count at 159 new features last year alone. That’s quite a head start and Amazon fans say it’s market position is unassailable.

But remember: People used to say the same about Microsoft.

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The first two data centers are in London and Helsinki, and more are planned for Chicago towards the middle of the year, then Las Vegas and Singapore. A spin-off of sorts from the established Finnish hosting firm Sigmatic, UpCloud claims to have 100 percent homegrown virtualization tech. According to general manager Antti Vilpponen, this keeps costs low and services flexible:

“Our offering is truly scaleable and flexible – we’re not giving any predetermined set of instances. You can freely choose the amount of CPUs, memory and storage… We’re really fast -– all servers are deployed in less than 60 seconds -– and our network stack is 100 percent redundant.”

Alongside enterprise-grade redundancy, the company offers fully dedicated server resources and one-click migration between availability zones. What’s more, Vilponnen said, unlike with Amazon Web Services, the cheapest service levels UpCloud offers have the same level of performance you’d get with more expensive packages. As the tech was built in-house, UpCloud offers a 100 percent Service Level Agreement (SLA) and 50x downtime compensation — that’s a decent uptime guarantee, which should bolster the enterprise-grade status UpCloud is going for.

There’s a browser-based control panel and apps for Android and iOS, while those with more complex control needs also have an API (although it’s not fully Amazon compatible) that they can play with. CPU, memory, storage – both HDD and SSD — OS, firewall and IP addresses are all billed on an hourly basis. Network traffics and storage device I/O requests are billed by use.

Right now UpCloud is being personally bankrolled by founder and CTO Joel Pihlajamaa, who is also Sigmatic’s CEO. That makes it pretty impressive to see the company apparently already undercutting local rivals, if not Amazon itself at this point. For example, Vilponnen showed me a chart showing a low-tier UpCloud package of 2GB memory and 100GB storage priced at €41.84 ($54.47) monthly, versus €57.40 on Elastichosts and €72.03 on CloudSigma (it should be noted that CPU amounts were included in the calculation but not explicit in the price, “as they change quite a lot between the providers”).

“We really think offering constantly high-performing resources at affordable prices is key to how want to position ourselves,” Vilponnen said. “We won’t be able to overcome Amazon in Europe within a couple of years, but we’ve got big plans.”

UpCloud is even offering the first 1,000 people that register from Monday morning (and buy €10 of credit) an extra €100 in free credit, so there’s clearly a fair amount of money to back this up — for now. Bootstrapping will only take you so far in the scale-driven cloud business, though, so UpCloud would do well to raise fresh funding this year, as it intends to.

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