Avni Networks, the software startup purporting to build the "self-driving cloud," still hasn't announced the Series A round of funding that's it's talked about since at least March. Nor has it revealed its five marquee customers — Fortune 100 types from media and finance, CEO Rohini Kasturi has said, whose names are still hidden away like golden tickets.

But today, Avni can point to one new sign of progress, in the form of a partnership with HP.

The companies are announcing that Avni's software is available as an option to run on top of HP's software-defined networking (SDN) platform or in its cloud. The software is available through the SDN applications store that HP launched last fall.

For Avni, the key to the HP partnership is "having the reach to a lot of enterprise customers immediately," CEO Rohini Kasturi says. If Avni has been able to attract large paying customers already, as Kasturi has claimed, then a connection into HP's enterprise client base could be fruitful.

Avni's Software Defined Cloud (SDC) aims to let enterprises build distributed applications that can be easily moved between clouds. That could be particularly useful if, as most analysts and vendors believe, enterprises settle on a hybrid cloud model, splitting applications between private and public clouds.

Application mobility would also give enterprises some leverage, setting up some competitive pressure among the public cloud providers. On the flip side, cloud service providers could theoretically use the SDC themselves to create managed hybrid cloud services.