"It's the conundrum of interoperability," notes IDC analyst Jean Bozman. "It works both ways. Microsoft could say they have a certain amount of interoperability with Novell Linux as well. But the industry loves battles between vendors and products."

Red Hat's announcements Wednesday include , "software for building and managing a hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud that can deploy and manage across heterogeneous physical servers, virtualization platforms, and other clouds," as noted in Red Hat's trademark on the product name.

Essentially, this lets businesses build clouds that would approximate the capabilities of Amazon EC2 within their own networks, performing resource management across physical and virtual servers and connecting to public clouds. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss and application life-cycle management tools feature prominently in the new product package.

CloudForms "allows users to more easily configure and manage complex multi-tier applications, rather than having to independently manage large numbers of virtual servers," Red Hat said. "Once defined, these applications can be deployed, managed and moved between different clouds, virtualization environments and bare-metal servers."

Supported cloud providers include Amazon, IBM and NTT Communications. Red Hat and VMware virtualization are each supported.