This past week has seen quite a bit of updates from the cloud, and Juniper Networks and Cisco topped the list. Juniper Networks finally unveiled the end result of Project Stratus, a 3-year $100 million investment which spawned 125 new patents. QFabric, as it’s now called, is a new datacenter cloud fabric designed to reduce network layers and complexity QFabric does that by collapsing network layers and make a network look like a single flat switch.

Juniper founder and CTO Pradeep Sindhu:

“”QFabric looks like a single large flat logical switch and a single switch that has industry standard interfaces,” Sindhu said. “What the single large switch enables is full resource pooling as well as partitioning of resources for organizational purposes.”

With QFabric cross data center latency can reportedly be as low as 3.71 microseconds and requires much less overall administration time, including tremendously simplified management and provision.

The debut of QFabric is Juniper biggest news this week, but the networking giant didn’t stop there. The company announced it has integrated its vGW Virtual Gateway with SRX Gateways into a new offering, and also launched Ethernet Transport 2.0 (CET) in a joint venture with Nokia.

Juniper is behind some of the mot s noteworthy highlights in tech lately, and the same can definitely be said about Cisco. The company launched Cisco Telepresence, a video according and sharing tool for the enterprise. The launch of this new offering comes shortly after the appointment of a new COO – former executive VP of Cisco’s services business Gary Moore. Cisco also reached a crucial milestone, and generated more revenues from its newer offerings than from what used to be its core switch business. It did however pulled the plug on its somewhat backwards e-mail service Cisco Mail, and on a slightly different note launched the HD media-friendly Linksys E4200 broadband router.

Juniper Networks and Cisco are two of the biggest players in the cloud, but the party doesn’t stat before Amazon jumps on board. PCWorld reports AWS has launched CloudFormation, an offering which aims to simplify the process of building complex clouds.

“By creating a template to describe the stack of applications and resources needed, users don’t have to do the configuration work manually. CloudFormation takes care of provisioning, while taking into account any dependencies between resources, according to AWS.”

Cisco, Juniper and Amazon are all trying to keep their hold of the market by out-innovating the competition, but Google took a much more “direct” approach in its battle against Microsoft. The internet giant released Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, an add-on which will integrate Google into the Office Suit, and users away from it.

The cloud and virtualization are gradually striking root in just about every industry and sector, and monetization is an inevitable trend. Egenera did the same in its transit from a hardware vendor to a software maker, and our News Editor Kristen Niocle interviewed CEO Pete Manca earlier as well.