We reported earlier today that EMC has released an update to its Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform service that rolls out many new features. You’ll now be able to use Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform to build your own public storage cloud, to build a private storage cloud, or to connect your on-premise storage to EMC’s public cloud (or another cloud running EMC’s architecture).

The stakes are being raised in the cloud storage category, but what’s really interesting is how these stakes are being raised across cloud categories.

In infrastructure-as-a-service, look at OpenStack. It’s being driven by many players, but Rackspace was one of the first and most active members. Rackspace has its own public IaaS business, but it’s also contributing to the open source OpenStack project, which is arguably raising the stakes for other IaaS platforms. You’ve got to have a public cloud, plus be able to play well in private data centers. Look at Joyent’s SmartDataCenter and Microsoft Azure as well.

In the platform-as-a-service world, look at Cloud Foundry, an open source project sponsored by VMware (which happens to own EMC). It exists as a public cloud service or as technology that can be used by other companies to build public clouds, or could be used to build a private PaaS cloud.

AppFog is one company that has built a public cloud offering based on CloudFoundry. But CEO Lucas Carlson doesn’t see AppFog as being in competition with VMWare. In fact, AppFog is contributing to Cloud Foundry. AppFog is trying to offer a better experience built on CloudFoundry, and the company is planning to eventually offer its own on-premise version of AppFog, which will include added value built on top of the normal CloudFoundry offering. He thinks offering an on-premise version will eventually be table stakes for PaaS providers.

It’s not there yet, but looking at EMC’s strategy with Atmos and the direction IaaS has taken, you can see why Carlson thinks that way. In the software-as-a-service market, Salesforce.com is sticking to its public cloud only guns, but companies like Oracle and SAP are offering products both in the public cloud or on-premises.

It could be that established public cloud players like Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com never have to offer private products, but the trend towards having the option to run a software stack anywhere is growing. Part of this may be an attempt to market to companies that fear the public cloud. But what I’m hoping – particularly with regards to OpenStack and Cloud Foundry – is that the results, regardless of the motivation, will be an overall reduction of vendor lock-in.

Photo by Mekuria Getinet