The hybrid cloud has never been higher on the industry’s to-do list. Vendors both large and small are lining up to tackle the many challenges of linking on- and off-premise environments, chief among them interoperability, which drew even more attention than usual last week after Apprenda Inc. joined the race for open standards.

The fast-growing platform-as-a-service provider, which lists big corporate names such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Honeywell International, Inc. among its customers, is rolling out a new partner initiative called CloudOne Alliance aimed at creating a federated solution ecosystem not hampered by portability issues. The program shares many similarities with the OnApp Federation that launched in June, but doesn’t yet match it in scope, a disadvantage that Apprenda has partially offset by tapping industry heavy-hitters such as Citrix Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and CA Technologies Inc. as launch partners. Another major difference lies in the fact that OnApp Inc. is focusing on leveling the playing field against Amazon.com Inc., whereas the PaaS firm hopes to streamline application delivery at the market level.

And while Apprenda is taking the organic route to delivering interoperability, Nasuni Inc. is attacking the problem from a different angle with a cloud-integrated storage array that allows organizations to move data off-premise with a few clicks and manage it from the same place as their in-house hardware.  The company not only provides the physical appliances but the management software and managed services as well, a uniquely well-rounded value proposition that has netted it $10 million in funding last week from an “an unnamed strategic backer” and existing  investors Flybridge Capital Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. The capital infusion will help the startup better respond to growing competition from the likes of Microsoft, which is offering a similar set of benefits with its Azure-enabled StorSimple arrays.

Over on the other end of the cloud spectrum, Sclar Inc., the company behind the open-source management platform of the same name, has released a new solution for monitoring spending across providers. The offering seems to be a response to the recently introduced price tracking  service from rival RightScale Inc. and includes many of the same features, notably  integration with other administrative functions, a centralized view of private and public deployments and a forecasting tool for predicting future expenditure.

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