Hosted service provider Chinook Communications has announced it’s the first company to market with Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Multitenant Pack for Partner Hosting for unified communications.

This is a bigger deal than it might sound at first blush. One of the major selling points for Microsoft Office 365 — over both its Microsoft BPOS cloud predecessor and hosted Microsoft Lync 2010 services — was that its multitenant, modern infrastructure represented the wave of the future. In fact, at least one hosted service provider stuck with the older Microsoft Office Communications Server for a while just to maintain its multitenant edge, which it would have lost had it upgraded to Lync 2010.

According to the press release, Chinook is offering its newly multitenant Lync services as part of its Total Connect bundle, which offers Exchange 2010-based messaging, SharePoint 2010 collaboration and the entire range of Lync-based presence, voice and webconferencing functionalities.

Chinook Communications President Steve Schwartz explained a little bit of the background behind this announcement in a prepared statement:

It’s a theme we’ve seen a lot of this week: hosted service providers that are competing with the major cloud players by bolstering their own offerings. It’s definitely a trend we’ll continue to track, so stay tuned.