Amazon cloner Eucalyptus Systems, newScale and rPath are seeking strength in numbers to ward off the raft of upstart newcomers like Nimbula promising to give companies their own private Amazon-style clouds.

The company also gives Eucalyptus some salve to rub on the nasty nicks it got when NASA, its prime customer, pulled away to go and play with Rackspace on the OpenStack team in search of Amazon-like scale.

The three cloud players - each with different skills - have pooled their technologies to concoct an integrated platform described as an "on-ramp to private and hybrid cloud computing in the enterprise." And they've tapped MomentumSI to deliver the thing, which promises to transform IT departments into internally managed versions of public cloud services like Rackspace or Amazon EC2.

The combined widgetry is supposed to give users the infrastructure and process maturity to provide the dynamic elasticity found in public clouds.

newScale is kicking in its policy-based self-service portal widgetry so users can order what they need in the way of enterprise IT services from a menu of standard options. rPath is contributing its automated platform and application deployment and maintenance mojo and Eucalyptus its open source private cloud infrastructure software. MomentumSI is providing implementation services, best practices and the adoption model.

They're hoping to attract the Fortune 1000.

Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, was wheeled out to say, "Cloud solutions won't come in a box, nor are traditional internal IT technologies and skills apt to seamlessly spin up mission-ready cloud services. Neither are cloud providers so far able to provide custom or ‘shrinkwrapped' offerings that conform to a specific enterprise's situation and needs. That leaves a practical void, and therefore an opportunity, in the market. Ecosystem-based solutions then are the first, best way that many organizations will likely actually use and deploy cloud services. The technology value triumvirate of newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus - with solution practice experience of MomentumSI - is an excellent example of the ecosystem approach most likely to become the way that cloud models actually work for enterprises for the next few years."