Enomaly supports the Xen hypervisor, will support VMware within a few weeks and Microsoft's in 2009, Cohen says. Hypervisors lack migration capabilities that make it easy to move applications to services like Amazon EC2, and thus can be augmented with Enomaly's software to become more flexible, Cohen argues.

"They don't look at networking beyond their own infrastructure," Cohen says of the industry's major hypervisor vendors. "They assume you're going to stick within the context of their particular platform. In reality, there is a heterogeneous environment."

Because Enomaly is vendor-agnostic, the software provides the ability to bring into the cloud whatever virtual machine is best suited to run a particular application, an attribute Intel needs for its content distribution engine, Smith of Intel says.

Smith views Enomaly as a "cloud compute infrastructure built for cloud operators or those who want to operate their environment in the cloud from day one."

But he says is better positioned than Enomaly to help enterprises bridge the gap between data centers and externally accessed cloud services.