Here’s the initial list of partners aligning with Google for its news infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Opscode will offer its Chef tools with Google Compute Engine for infrastructure automation. This means server provisioning, configuration management and the delivery of infrastructure and applications. Opscode says it will leveraging its knife plugin for Google Compute Engine, businesses of all sizes can rapidly create, bootstrap and manage Google cloud resources.

Puppet Labs Enterprise has a module available on Google Compute Engine. Download is available via Puppet Forge.

Rightscale is offering a private beta for customers to manage Google Compute Engine with RightScale cloud management to deploy workloads and dynamic configurations.

Numerate is integrating its proprietary algorithms and platform with Google Compute Engine. Numerate works with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to increase the speed and effectiveness of small molecule drug discovery for Parkinson’a, Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

MapR Technologies will offer its Hadoop distribution on-demand via Google Compute Engine.

Cliqr Technologies allows for applications to move between private and public clouds. Cliqr says its intent is to simplify the process of on-boarding, testing and securely running applications on Google’s Compute Engine.

Matt Weinberger called it earlier this week when he pointed out that Cliqr and MapR would be likely partners. Here’s what he wrote about Cliqr:

And speaking of cloud app migration, today’s launch of CliQr, a Google Ventures-backed startup that boasts one-click redeployment to any cloud infrastructure, which could be a subtle on-ramp to a Google IaaS cloud.

If anything,this initial list of partners reflects Google’s enterprise focus. Google has scale. It has its platform as a service (PaaS) with Google App Engine and its robust APIs. This initial list of partners shows that Google simply wants enterprise customers to get on board and hopefully see why it makes sense to stay there, too.