As 2009 comes to an end and 2010 just around the corner there is no shortage of cloud new as usual.  The topic that tops lists for technology trends in the IT market is full steam ahead with ever increasing awareness from the buy side while incumbent vendors scramble to "cloudify" everything and managed service providers evolve or dissolve.

One service provider who is choosing the evolve route is Opsource, a Santa Clara based service provider specializing in SaaS since 2002 before this thing called cloud took over.  Late last year they decided to start working on an additional service in the cloud form of "pay as you go".  They got to work building their own billing and cloud service and launched it in summer of this year.

Launching the service was a great start but of course you cannot stand still in cloudland.  Opsource continues ramp up cloud ops with two recent announcements.

First is their support of Windows Server 2008 .  Their claim of being the first cloud to support Windows Server 2008 as a standard option is a bit much as Amazon just announced their support for WS 2008 as well this week.  A big plus the Opsource team does have going for them is fact they are running VMWare as their hypervisor which is one of the supported ones from Microsoft themselves.  This means that Microsoft stands behind Opsource from a support perspective.  This is different from say Amazon who runs their home grown hypervisor layer built on top of Xen.

Second bit of news is their adoption of the Mezeo storage middleware solution.  Mezeo is one of those startups that just seems to get it both from a technology and market adoption approach.  We first came across Mezeo earlier in the year at the great cloud event that the DealMakerMedia team put on to showcase startups are up and coming. 

Mezeo is certainly a star pupil in that class and having Opsource give them the thumbs up should really help accelerate their adoption even more then has already happened in 2010.  You will definitely be seeing more coverage of Mezeo here but in short, they allow providers of all shapes/sizes take existing storage infrastructure and turn it into a web service enabled, S3-esque offering, that has a suite of built in services around collaboration, discovery, and security.

Of course Opsource is not done by any means.  No standing still when it comes to cloud.  They are going right at Amazon by claiming "Opsource Cloud is what AWS/EC2 wants to be when it grows up" and their service/support offerings combined with their long tradition (by cloud standards) of focusing on SaaS gives them an edge in a battle of commodity/self-service versus traditional value add services.