CumuLogic, the latest Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) start-up, sent its widgetry out into public beta the other day hoping enterprises, cloud providers and ISVs use it to build and manage Java apps in public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

It's after the mid-sized and large enterprises, where Java lives, that want to develop and deploy Java apps in the cloud. And it's not exactly going to turn away any enterprise-grade cloud vendors looking to offer their customers a Java Platform-as-a-Service.

Naturally, out in the wild it'll encounter CloudBees' RUN@Cloud, VMware's Cloud Foundry, Red Hat's OpenShift and Microsoft's Azure.

The company was started a few months ago by Sun émigrés Rajesh Ramchandani and Laura Ventura, and has Java's father James Gosling and former Sun CIO and Sun Federal president Bill Vass heading its Technical Advisory Board.

CumuLogic's widgetry is IaaS-agnostic and users can build a PaaS on Amazon's public cloud or VMware, Eucalyptus and the Citrix' Cloud.com/Project Olympus private clouds - with OpenStack in the works.

CumuLogic's contribution to cloud mania is to support the use of multiple clouds from multiple vendors at the same time, which is why it suits Gosling, who complains about the cloud's lack of interoperability. The start-up's got a management console that keeps track of what's going on simultaneously in both the public and private clouds.

Ramchandani says, "CumuLogic is unique in that we are one of the first companies to emerge with a full Java PaaS for the federated cloud. Instead of rewriting applications to fit new platforms and essentially giving up standardized application components, we sought to create a product that would give users the flexibility to keep using those components, from application platforms to databases."

Its trick is to keep all the images - with their necessaries - in a catalog that automatically updates and patches them when advised to do so.

Ramchandani imagines companies consolidating their applications into a single platform deployed across the enterprise on the same infrastructure like setting up an enterprise-wide master account on EC2 with access controls, quotas and hard/soft limits on cloud resources for users and departments to manage capacity, usage, security and compliance.

Immediately CumuLogic only supports CentOS, the Red Hat clone, on ESXi, Xen and KVM. Java, Ruby and PHP applications can access middleware and databases as services. Figure MySQL and DB2, JBoss and WebSphere application servers and Apache 2.x and Nginx 0.9 web servers, and Tomcat to start.

In time Ramchandani, who's VP of products, said to expect MongoDB, Cassandra NoSQL and Oracle databases, Hadoop and RabbitMQ.

CumuLogic's product is based on a cloud application management platform and includes cloud services automation, auto-scaling, monitoring, resource management and user management.

It's supposed to simplify things.

It includes features such as IaaS abstraction, policy-based workload deployment, and the ability to mix-and-match infrastructure software for deploying modern applications as well as consolidating legacy Java applications on a single platform, lowering the cost of managing multiple infrastructure assets.

By supporting multiple Java EE containers, CumuLogic says it alleviates the way users develop new applications or migrate existing applications to the cloud.

The beta version can be downloaded for free at http://www.cumulogic.com. It should GA in September or October. It's been in limited beta on Amazon for a couple of months.

CumuLogic is an early-stage angel-funded start-up with expectations of going out for, say, $4 million-$5 million in venture funding soon.