Last month VMware launched a web-based storefront that its partners can use to showcase their offerings to prospects in a much more straight-forward and effective way. Today, storage behemoth EMC – which owns a 90 percent majority stake in VMware – also made a push to expand its sales channel, and on an entirely different level.

A fresh release revealed that the company and its virtualization subsidiary are key partners in a joint venture with Atos: Canopy, a one-stop-shop cloud firm that will bundle up business apps with the private cloud, public cloud and a host of associated services, and will offer it all up to enterprise customers. The EMC/VMware powered and Atos-managed offerings are all based on open standards, eliminating vendor lock-in issues.

Here’s the breakdown of what the industry can look forward to from Canopy:

For apps, it will provide organizations with access to its software-as-a-service app store, which will featured industry specific cloud-based and other enterprise-grade software solutions. There will also be a Java PaaS that will enable the same customers to develop their own applications in a secure environment.

The core of it is a plug-and-play cloud stack that companies will be able to deploy either on-premise or off-premise to create a hybrid deployment, which comes along several services offerings. These include cloud roadmap consulting, adoption plans and so forth.

Just like VCE, Canopy is powered by EMC and VMware tech. The only difference is that this time Atos is the third investor in the project rather than Cisco, and that this latest venture still needs to prove it can deliver the same results VCE does today.

Headquartered in Europe, Canopy will propose Cloud offerings from dedicated infrastructures in order to ensure its customers’ data protection and security, complying with all relevant regulations. Canopy CEO will be appointed by Atos, its principal shareholder.