When it comes to hybrid cloud computing partners of VMware (VMW) have been stuck between a proverbial rock and a hard place. In terms of applications running in a local dater center, VMware has been rock solid. But in terms of the cloud VMware is overshadowed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and a small army of cloud service providers that rely heavily towards open source software.

VMware this week took a major step towards making things less hard for its partners in the cloud with the release of VMware vSphere 6, an upgrade that among other things adds support for the open source OpenStack cloud management framework and an implementation of VMware NSX networking software that later this year will be able to span on premise environments and the VMware vCloud Air public cloud service.

In the case of OpenStack Mark Chuang, senior director of product marketing for software-defined data center suites, said VMware is enabling OpenStack to run within VMware vSphere as an alternative to open source Kernel-based virtual machines (KVM). By providing a common latey of management software, Chang said VMware is making it easier for applications that want to invoke OpenStack application programming interfaces (APIs) to coexist with VMware.

Meanwhile, VMware at the same time is not only making it possible to extend the same virtual network between a local data center and VMware vCloud Air; it is substantially reducing the complexity and time it takes to provision those virtual networks.

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While there are more than 650 new features in VMware vSphere 6, the addition of OpenStack support along with the extended reach of NSX will prove crucial as VMware tries to extend its influence in local data center first into the realm of the private cloud and then ultimately the hybrid cloud. In fact, the first major step towards accomplishing that goal was a hybrid cloud alliance VMware just formed with Google (GOOG).

For all the hype surrounding cloud computing the emergence of hybrid clouds at this juncture can best be described as nascent. IT organizations are building private cloud that run on premise or in the cloud. But not many of them have extended the reach of the applications that run on those private cloud across multiple cloud computing platforms. The good news from a solution provider perspective is that the extension of those applications across hybrid cloud computing platforms is now all but inevitable; an opportunity that VMware and its partners arguably now has the inside track to exploit to its fullest extent.