I started this week at CloudConnect in Santa Clara. Today I am at the Parallels conference in Orlando. In this short 48 hours I’ve heard of six new versions or updates of the private cloud.

A recap:

• This morning, Red Hat announced it will offer Enterprise MRG Grid subscriptions on Amazon EC2 via Red Hat Cloud Access.
• Parallels wants piece of the $60 billion small business market for cloud services by primarily targeting the hosting community. This is really about private cloud offerings through hosting providers and telcos.
• A brewing storm erupted about Cloudscaling’s Open Cloud System, which raised immediate contention in the Clouderati, capped by a not so convincing rant by Christopher Hoffe, aka @Beaker. I’ll explain  in a later post.
• Citrix launched CloudStack 3. Citrix acquired Cloud.com last year. It’s a private cloud offering that has a fit with OpenStack’s Swift storage environment.
• Nimbula announced its new Nimbula Director 2.0 private-cloud software, which promises Amazon EC2 functionality.(For reference see GigaOm’s Barb Darrow post about Citrix and Nimbula’s AWS style offerings. )
• And today, Rackspace Hosting announced a partnership with Redapt for customers to build out their own infrastructure.

Redapt is essentially a packaging company. The order goes in for a cluster and Redapt works with Rackspace to package and shrink wrap the pre-configured, tested and configured servers. Within two weeks, those servers then get drop shipped to the data center. The service is part of the evolving Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition (RCPE). RCPE is is built on OpenStack.

Services Angle

Scott Sanchez of Rackspace gave me the summary of the new Rackspace service in a phone call yesterday. His point, over and over again, is the story about the company’s fanatical support. That’s the company’s theme so it’s not a huge surprise. But what I like about it? Rackspace is not trying to sell you its hardware or complex, proprietary software that requires an army of IT virtualization experts. It’s about the service and not having to worry about tinkering with the machines. Is it a solid offering? In terms of packaging, yes. Smart move.

But in all of this news, AWS continues to dominate the conversation. It in itself is the infrastructure that allows an ecosystem of service providers to offer platforms, SaaS offerings and apps. OpenStack is essentially a way to compete against what AWS has built. Cloudscaling, Citrx and Nimbula all refer to AWS as either competitor, allie or both. Even Parallels sees AWS as a potential threat.

So what does this mean? AWS will lead for a long time to come.