ActiveState today announced a few new features for its Cloud Foundry based private platform-as-a-service Stackato. Last week the company added HP Cloud Services to its list of supported cloud providers. Today the company added OpenStack, Linux KVM and Citrix XenServer, plus a new graphical management console. Stackato also supports Amazon EC2 and VMware vSphere.

Like AppFog, ActiveState has chosen to build a PaaS by customizing Cloud Foundry. Also like AppFog, ActiveState originally started building its own private PaaS, but switched to Cloud Foundry when VMware announced the project last year. But while AppFog has focused thus far on its public cloud initiative, ActiveState is focusing entirely on helping its customers build private PaaSes, either on the customers’ own infrastructure or in public clouds. Cloud Foundry supports Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, Node.js and more.

Although AppFog plans to someday release a private version of its PaaS, ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland believes that its first mover advantage and extensive enterprise experience will give his company an edge against the competition. ActiveState has an impressive customer list, including Cisco, CA, HP, Bank of America, Siemens, and Lockheed Martin. The company claims to work with 97% of the Fortune 1000. Will that existing client base translate into Stackato customers?

ActiveState Stackato provides its enterprise customers with more flexibility than public cloud providers like Heroku can. Copeland says many enterprise customers have processes and compliance requirements that can’t be met with a one sized fits all hosted service. Stacketo gives them the ability to deploy on or off-premise, but customize the stack as they see fit. To some extent, it will increasingly be competing with combined IaaS/PaaS providers like Amazon Elastic Cloud.