Building a cloud from scratch is a daunting technical and financial endeavor. But there's more than one way to join the ranks of cloud providers.

Many paths to providing self-branded cloud services don't involve expertise in designing cooling systems for hyper-scale data centers, leases on acres of land, or teams of virtualization specialists, as illustrated by a unique partnership between Egenera, a Boxborough, Mass. software developer, and Entatech, an IT distributor out of the UK.