This past week in the cloud has been a particularly exciting one. This is notably because some of major, multibillion-dollar milestones some of the biggest players in tech has reached, as well as a number of highlighted product releases. For example, Cisco and Verizon just rolled their joint cloud-based unified communications service into beta, marking a unique development for both the recouping Cisco, and wireless provider Verizon, as it seeks new entries into the cloud space.

The service is offered by Verizon in Cisco’s HCS Hosted Collaboration Suite, and includes the hosted email, Jabber instant messaging and presence, conferencing, unified wired and wireless clients as well as other offerings integrated with some of Verizon’s products.

Another company who had a product update is DataDirect Networks, who just launched NAS Scaler. The latter, an enterprise file storage platform, introduces a host of features and a lot of automation, as well as a great deal of efficiency.  It’s a big move for DDN, as it develops its scaling services, a crowded market to say the least.

Over at the start-up front, SQL Database-as-a-service provider Xeround added support for the Rackspace cloud, and introduced it has introduced automatic scaling for its DaaS offering. Another company who expanded its market range is open source storage service provider Gluster, which is now supporting KVM and Xen environments.

Moving deeper into open-source grounds, Cloudera had a very big announcement a few days ago. Cloudera Distribution, including Apache Hadoop v3, hit general availability, and it now comes with 7 supporting programs, better performance and improved security, among other things.

The OpenStack project has seen a lot of updates lately, and this past week was no exclusion. GigaSpaces joined the OpenStack Community, expanding the high profile partners of the Rackspace and NASA project.  As cloud standards become readily discussed, the shared responsibility lies on those participants willing to contribute to initiatives such as OpenStack.

The cloud has proved itself as a breeding ground for innovation, but according to Stanford economist Timothy Bresnahan, the cutting edge of cloud innovation is in the consumer segment rather than the enterprise and government sectors. Enterprise and government are the biggest customers of this technology, but that doesn’t change anything, according to Bresnahan.

“The cutting edge of innovation is on the consumer side — digital technologies for consumption activity, play, entertainment and social-networked communication — and not in corporations anymore,” observed Timothy F. Bresnahan, an economist at Stanford.”