This week in the cloud has been – once again – a very interesting one overall.

The first update comes from Scala, which is introducing the cloud and analytics to a market that is making good time catching up with IT: the digital signage industry. The firm introduced a new hosted/on-premise app this week that brings retail site marketing to a whole new level with the addition of more targeting. The platform looks at customer trends and behaviors to determine the best approaches, most worthwhile inventory items and so forth.

Next up is Nimble Storage, not to be confused with the hot new CRM startup we’ve also been covering occasionally. The hardware maker got a few of its reference architectures certified for VMware View, which should make them available to a very broad demographic of companies that run the virtualization giant’s solutions.

The next two updates in our weekly roundup cover a third major trend in the cloud – the as-a-service model, and specifically PaaS. Vendors seem to be getting more and more creative in this particular area.

FeedHenry, a mobile dev platform built for HTML5 and Node.js app development, said that it has added support for VMware’s open-source Cloud Foundry platform. The solution is a relatively new one in a field dominated by AWS, Azure and the other mega-players, but thanks to a growing ecosystem and quality base good it has picked up a lot of momentum in the past few months.

Google Apps, the internet giant’s own PaaS, also got some love this week. Panzura revealed a new solution that’s entirely based on the service only with additions such as very high encryption and other functionality that would appeal to joint commercial clients offloading mission-critical apps and data to Google’s cloud.