ActiveState, the company that developed some of the most widely used distributions of Python and Perl, joined the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or OASIS in short. Diane Mueller, director of enterprise product management for the company will be leading the initiative and is now a part of the OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) committee, which plays a key role within the organization.

As the name implies OASIS is dedicated to creating a standard for cloud applications in vendor-agnostic environments, and the members of TOSCA are spearheading the effort. Among them are IBM, CA Technologies, Citrix and Red Hat.

“OSCA will enable the interoperable description of application and infrastructure cloud services, the relationships between parts of the service, and the operational behavior of these services (e.g., deploy, patch, shutdown)–independent of the supplier creating the service, and any particular cloud provider or hosting technology. TOSCA will also make it possible for higher-level operational behavior to be associated with cloud infrastructure management.”

ActiveState comes in the picture with Stackato, one of the first enterprise version of VMware’s Cloud Foundry. The PaaS’s main selling point is that its open nature allows customers to fully customize the offering deep down the in stack. ActiveState offers its own tools to migrate cloud apps and getting involved with OASIS is a big step forward in this area.

In addition to being a part of the OASIS community ActiveState is also a part of the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) ecosystem as of October. The PaaS provider is quickly expanding around Stackato even though the service is far from finished.

Stackato entered public beta just last month, and with the roll out came a number of new features. These include integration with app performance monitoring service New Relic.