Cloud Computing on Ulitzer

When Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the world's biggest telco, took a piece of the $10 million E series funding going into OpSource earlier this year, the pair reportedly didn't know they would be going into the cloud business together - or that it would be on the same day that AT&T told people to stand by because it was about to launch an Infrastructure-as-a-Service that looks a lot like Amazon.

Carriers like NTT and AT&T can give cloud-craving enterprises a warm and cuddly, hesitancy-overcoming feeling because of the way they have with security, availability and performance - and their ability to make production clouds cheaper than Amazon can because they can cut a deal on outbound connectivity. And Amazon can't run a security check on who's using its cloud the way carriers can to make the metaphor safer.

So now OpSource is piggybacking on NTT America, a subsidiary of NTT Communications and one of Google's main networking suppliers that provides enterprise hosting, managed networks and IP networking services worldwide, in the name of the enterprise public cloud adoption.

NTT America is kicking in its secure data centers and Tier 1 global IP network as the underpinning of the OpSource Cloud, starting in America and eventually branching out.

According to OpSource CEO Trib Ryan, it's unlikely NTT will pick up another girl to dance with - let alone take home.

The OpSource Cloud, now in public beta and available for rental by the hour, is designed to let IT departments manage security as they would in their internal IT infrastructure. Along with the usual public cloud widgetry, it gives every user a virtual private cloud within its public cloud so they can determine their own degree of Internet exposure. The 20-cents-an-hour price tag for its outbound messaging may, if you look close at the numbers, be cheaper than Amazon's nominal 10 cents.

NTT originally thought it was buying into OpSource On-Demand, the start-up's SaaS cloud widgetry for ISVs that includes application management, compliance and business services. ISVs and system integrators, however, are reportedly attracted to the OpSource Cloud and have reportedly been hopping on it to resell to clients either directly or bundled covertly.