The buzz surrounding the long-awaited public offering of file sharing powerhouse Box Inc. drew out the competition last week, which took advantage of the attention to boost their own visibility.

Egnyte Inc. made headlines after unveiling a major upgrade to its rival platform that introduced an array of new automation capabilities for managing the flow of corporate data. The new functionality aims to address the exact same requirements as the controls that Box introduced last September, but the company claims an advantage thanks to the fact that its service can run in both the cloud – including on third-party platforms like Amazon Web Service – as well as behind the firewall. That can theoretically provide a single point of management over an organization’s entire environment, including files that are too sensitive to move to an off-premise cloud service.

Egnyte said that the upgrade extends the usefulness of its platform beyond mere business collaboration to a wide range of operational applications such as policy enforcement and workflow optimization. The strategy is part of a broader plan to add support for more use cases that is almost as ambitious as what Canonical Ltd. is trying to pull off with Ubuntu Core, which it has turned from an embedded operating system into a cloud platform and now back again.

Launched on Tuesday, the latest iteration of the container-centric Linux distribution targets emerging categories of connected devices that don’t have enough on-board computational capacity to support a full-blown stack. Canonical envisions developers using the cloud-based edition of Ubuntu Core to develop applications for such gizmos and then pushing out the code without any of the hassle involved in moving to production, a potentially major advantage over more-established operating systems in the embedded segment.

While Canonical has its eyes set on the connected universe, a low-key cloud startup is targeting another emerging area: healthcare tech. The seven-year-old goBalto, Inc. raised $12 million last week to accelerate the adoption of its service, which offers the purpose-built equivalent of Box for clinical trials. The platform provides a centralized environment to handle the thousands of records involved in the process of aggregating individual files into neat workflows and comes with a complementary analytics component.