CloudSwitch is "quite an interesting company," says Reuven Cohen, the founder of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum, a group that works to facilitate standards for cloud computing. Cohen, who is also the founder of a Toronto-based cloud-computing company called Enomaly, says he's particularly interested in the claim that the technology requires no configuration for companies trying to move into the cloud. "If it lives up to the hype, it would be really cool," he says. Cohen says there's already tremendous demand for services that help companies move their applications into the cloud. He notes that many companies are interested but haven't yet made the switch.

Cohen adds that cloud-computing providers have little incentive to provide the kind of service that CloudSwitch is offering. "Easy in means easy out," he says. "The last thing these guys want is for you to easily leave." A third-party service, on the other hand, can offer a product that makes it easy for companies to switch from one provider to another.

"Moving to the cloud is still not for the technologically faint-hearted," agrees William Fellows, a principal analyst with the 451 Group, a research firm based in New York. Many cloud providers are focused on hardware and infrastructure, he adds, and they don't have the software expertise needed to help customers transfer applications.

Fellows says a long-term opportunity for CloudSwitch could lie in enabling companies to switch between different cloud providers depending on the needs of different computing jobs. Companies might want some tasks to be processed by a cloud provider with data centers in a certain geographical location, for example, while other tasks might need to be scheduled based on the cheapest available price. Normally, it would be too difficult to move from one provider to another this way, but Fellows thinks CloudSwitch's technology could change this, if it works as promised.