"What we see is IT departments having to do massive, complex integrations to a single cloud architecture" said Gaurav Manglik, co-founder and CEO of CliQr Technologies. "Applications should be completely unhooked from infrastructure, so they interoperate with any cloud, and be able to move between clouds."

CliQr bills CloudCenter as a cloud-application management platform. An organization can package its application into a CliQr container that is then uploaded to a CliQr repository. From there, it can be deployed on either the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, a VMware- or an OpenStack-based cloud. More cloud options will be offered in the future.

By running their applications on CliQr, organizations will be able to move their workloads around more easily, avoiding lock-in and price gouging, Manglik said. They may also see performance improvements, due to the efficient way in which CliQr has engineered its platform to work with each cloud provider for specific types of workloads, Manglik said.

The service, should it work as advertised, could provide cloud users with a tool to more easily switch among different cloud providers to save cost and maintain high availability.

Last week, Rackspace president Lew Moorman at the GigaOm Structure conference about the dangers of being locked into one cloud provider, such as Amazon. Lock-in may limit cloud technology innovation and keep prices artificially high, he said.