Capping a busy summer, Midokura came to VMworld with another customer it could name: Norwegian service provider Zetta.IO.

Zetta.IO, which launched only recently, has been using Midokura in its cloud in beta-test mode since last year. It's one of many cloud providers responding to a need (or desire) to keep data within a particular country, said Dan Conde, Midokura's director of products, at VMworld earlier this week.

Numergy, in France, would be another example, one that coincidentally is also powered by an SDN startup: Nuage Networks.

Midokura suddenly has a lot going on — or, at least, a lot that it can talk about. The Zetta.IO deal follows the July announcement that Japanese service provider KVH is using Midokura's network virtualization in its Private Cloud Type-S offering. Last month, Midokura also won a chance to collaborate with Nokia to see what they can come up with together.

Midokura also claims to have some sizable deals it can't yet name. Conde and Midokura Chairman Tatsuya Kato rattled off a few while we talked at VMworld. One is in a private cloud for a company whose developers, working on about 80 products, need to spin up workloads at will. Another is a large SaaS provider.

But it's the named customers that add depth to the startup's claims of traction for its network overlay technology. Founded in 2009, Midokura offers MidoNet, a network virtualization scheme designed mainly for OpenStack Neutron environments. MidoNet has been integrated with Red Hat's OpenStack distribution, and Midokura is doing similar work with Mirantis, Conde said.

Midokura was hanging out at VMworld partly to discuss how an enterprise can migrate from a vSphere environment to Linux or OpenStack, the key being that MidoNet could be used to bridge workloads between the old and new environments. That comes up as a topic partly because enterprises are finding Amazon Web Services gets expensive at large scale, which is prodding them to look into OpenStack, Conde said.

On a side note — you might recall a partnership announced in March to use VXLAN to connect Cumulus Networks switches into MidoNet. That code is finally shipping, Conde said, and Midokura has similar code shipping for the Dell FTOS switch operating system as well.

And don't miss the rest of this week's VMworld 2014 news SDxCentral covered this week:

• VMware's EVO Doesn't Scare Nutanix
• VMworld Newswire: NSX, Storage, and a Touch of DevOps
• Nutanix Raises the Stakes by Raising $140M More
• Quanta Shows Off a VMware EVO:RACK (But Doesn’t Ship Yet)
• Dell & F5 Strike Partnerships With VMware NSX
• VMworld: VMware Gets Its Hands Dirty in Hardware, OpenStack, and Containers
• VMware NSX Puts the Spotlight on Security
• VMware Declares Docker Containers Are Friends, Not Foes