Wipro Infotech, the India/Middle East/Africa arm of IT services conglomerate Wipro Limited, has announced a partnership with private cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform vendor Eucalyptus Systems to deliver planning, deployment and management services to customers in the region, as well as a hosted cloud test lab.

“As one of the world’s leading IT consulting organizations, Wipro provides a ‘one-stop shop’ for customers looking to architect their applications and infrastructure for the cloud. This partnership will play an important role in enabling enterprises to transform their IT operations so that they have the flexibility and scalability to meet business demands,” said Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos in a prepared statement praising his company’s new business partner.

In addition to those services mentioned above, Wipro plans to open a so-called Eucalyptus Center of Excellence (COE), a hosted private cloud for customers to test cloud services, application performance and generally get a feel for the platform ahead of deployment. It’s a similar concept to the one Eucalyptus is building with CoreSite in the United States.

Once upon a time, Eucalyptus was the only open source-based private cloud vendor out there doing it. But now Rackspace is bringing OpenStack-based private clouds to the masses. Will partnerships with service providers such as this one with Wipro give Eucalyptus back its edge?