By Charlene O'Hanlon

Hosting.com is adding to its technology lineup with the introduction of two virtual appliances for customers working in the cloud.

Starting this month, Zimbra Mail and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 will be available as virtual appliances, allowing customers to launch and deploy the technologies instantly through Hosting.coms customer portal.

SharePoint 2010 is a pre-packaged application and virtual machine that can be deployed in a VMware cloud. Because it is a virtual appliance, there are no shared resources as with a managed multi-tenant SharePoint environment; the application runs as an individual installation for the customer. 

SharePoint 2010 will be available as a virtual appliance, virtual machine and on a dedicated server, depending on customers preferences.

Zimbra Mail will be offered as an appliance running on VMware vSphere 4 through Hosting.coms services catalog for private and public cloud environments.

The two new offerings are the latest solutions offered by Hosting.com in its service catalog, and the first applications offered as a virtual machine. Both can be launched through the Hosting.com Customer Portal.

Hosting.com hopes to add an extensive list of other applications to its services catalog for its portal to enable ISVs to develop and quickly deploy virtual appliances to cloud users. In addition, the company hopes to sell the services both online and through channel partners.