Eucalyptus Systems has inked a partnership with GroundWork Open Source. The deal should make it easier for corporate IT administrators and MSPs to  manage applications running in the Eucalyptus open source cloud platform. Here’s the deal.

First, a little background. Dozens of closed source and open source companies are battling for the cloud management spotlight. Eucalyptus is gaining attention for a few reasons, including the decision to hire MySQL veteran Marten Mickos as CEO.

For GroundWork’s part, their solution is designed to provide detailed monitoring for Eucalyptus clouds as well as for your garden variety data center resources and Amazon EC2 clouds. GroundWork is currently looking for participants in a beta program. The company claims the solution will allow testers to:

Plenty of companies are working on cloud monitoring platforms. Two examples involve Level Platforms and Nimsoft. Level Platforms was among the first MSP software providers to monitor Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), Nimsoft (now owned by CA) has launched a dashboard for a range of cloud systems.

On its own, the Eucalyptus-Groundwork deal doesn’t sound huge. But we suspect Eucalyptus will be making additional moves in the weeks ahead.

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