Verizon, which is really into this cloud business - against the day when phones as we know them evaporate into the ether - and so means to have clouds for everybody eventually, has added to its very high-end, mission-critical, totally handheld public cloud of last year.

It's taken VMware's Datacenter widgetry and built a somewhat lower-end hybrid cloud on its own far-flung global IP network that's gonna be cheaper than its initial offering and is more for enterprise folks that are already VMware-virtualized internally and can manage the virtual machines themselves, folks who want to export and import images between their private cloud and Verizon's public cloud less dynamically than with vMotion.

The underlying IT set-up won't have to change.

The widgetry won't be quite as secure as Verizon's existing Computing as a Service (CaaS) - but pretty close - and promises the all-important application portability - complements of VMware APIs - as well as scalability and federation.

Any device should be able to access the thing, any time from anywhere.

Verizon is trusting the solution will get its target accounts up off their collective arse and into the cloud.

Right now the thing, whose clumsy handle is Computing as a Service (CaaS) enabled by VMware vCloud Datacenter, is in field-test with the big International Hotel Group (IHG), a company whose business inherently sees peaks and troughs, expecting to widen the beta before the stuff goes GA in Q1.

While the high-end CaaS enterprise is priced à la carte, the Datacenter version will be available on both a utility model and a reservation model.

The company says it hasn't worked out the numbers yet but that's how it wants to price it; the first for transient trade, the latter for those with predictable workloads that want guaranteed resources.

In a few weeks Verizon expects to field a cloud - probably based on VMware's vCloud Express - that competes with Amazon for the developer.

Verizon's CaaS platform is the first cloud solution to achieve PCI compliance, Verizon Security Management Program (SMP) compliance, SAP certification and VMware vCloud Datacenter. It is also SAS 70 Type II-compliant.

VMware vCloud Datacenter leverages vSphere, the new vCloud Director and VMware vShield security solutions. With CaaS, it's supposed to provide consistent performance and auditable security, while integrating key Verizon security features including layer 2 isolation and LDAP integration with the addition of role-based access control.

Enterprise clients have the option of architecting their hybrid cloud using Verizon's private MPLS-based network or its global IP network.