One of the biggest things happening in the cloud space right now is the transition from a traditional virtualization environment in which everything goes through central administration to a self-service environment, or a developer friendly world. And one company positioned to address this new fad is Nimbula, a cloud operating system company.

Founded three years ago by the team that developed the industry-leading Amazon EC2 public cloud service, Nimbula is focused on delivering very new Infrastructure as a Service software.

“We are not trying to offer a service that competes with Amazon; we are trying to package that functionality so that you can run it on your own infrastructure,” Reza Malekzadeh, vice president of marketing for Nimbula, told TMCnet at Cloud Expo taking place in Santa Clara, Calif, Tuesday. “If you are a service provider or telco and want an offering, we can provide you with a layer of software for that cloud piece.”

Nimbula delivers a new class of cloud infrastructure and services system that combines the flexibility, scalability and operational efficiencies of the public cloud with the control, security and trust of today’s most advanced data centers, according to company officials.

Its flagship product, Nimbula Director, provides a cost-effective and secure way to build and manage clouds with global reach and scale.

Through its flagship product, Nimbula has found a niche market with the service providers and telcos and has also found its way into the hearts of enterprises, particularly large enterprises that have important internal infrastructure and want private cloud for new applications.

When asked how Nimbula distinguishes itself in such a competitive market, Malekzadeh said, “What makes us unique is the approach and philosophy we have.”

“A lot of people in the space offer a layer of management on top of existing virtualization,” he said. “We build everything from the ground up.”

While at Cloud Expo this week, taking place from Nov. 7-10, Nimbula has been spreading the word about how it makes itself in known in this market and about the recent news it has celebrated.

Specifically, last month, Nimbula announced two major news items surrounding VMware technology and products that further position Nimbula Director as a leading Infrastructure as a Service layer for enterprises and service providers, according to company officials.

Its first announcement was that VMware Cloud Foundry, the industry’s first open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), will be integrated with Nimbula Director using Nimbula’s Virtual Services framework.  In addition, Nimbula shared the news that its Nimbula Director will add support for VMware vSphere. The addition of support for VMware vSphere will allow customers to leverage Nimbula’s orchestration features on top of the VMware vSphere cloud infrastructure platform.

“We are on a path of execution since last summer,” Malekzadeh said of the recent announcements. “We came out of stealth mode in June of 2010. We keep bringing innovation to the market.”

Part of that innovation is continuing to educate the market about cloud.

According to Malekzadeh, right now the market is still “pretty immature” and needs some more education. Particularly, companies all over are  simply slapping the term “cloud” on their existing offerings and other startups are claiming they now offer cloud communications. This marketing perspective exacerbates the confusion surrounding cloud, according to Malekzadeh.

“We are of the belief that one size does not fit all,” he said. “You cannot have a technology that solves everyone’s problem. There’s a big need for continued education so that customers can really understand which aspect or which dimension or which piece of this cloud thing will be useful and relevant to them.”

“What we are hopping is this maturation cycle will keep moving forward and hopefully accelerate,” he added.