Last week saw the rivalry among the top players in the public cloud flare up once again. Dropbox Inc. led the charge with the release of a major update to its iOS client that aims to help workers access their data faster when away from the office.

Focusing mainly on increasing the visibility of important files and improving collaboration, the new features continue the cloud-based sharing giant’s efforts to extend its reach into the mobile universe. The strategy falls into step with broader pattern of providers trying to expand their offerings to more parts of the enterprise, a trend that also includes the giants of the infrastructure-as-a-service world.

Microsoft became the latest big name to join the fray last week with the launch of a new hosted monitoring option on its public cloud that enables organizations to keep track of their workloads wherever they happen to run, including in their own data centers and on competing platforms. The support for rival providers is a theme that comes straight from the playbook of Google, which introduced similar cross-platform functionality earlier this year.

The new  Operations Management Suite, as Redmond calls it, ups the ante for the search giant with automation functionality that promisies to reduce repetitive and error-prone manual activities such as setting up new instances. The company hopes that making the functionality accessible to users on competing clouds will lower the barriers to switching to its own, a strategy that apparently is already yielding fruit.

The launch of the new monitoring capabilities was followed closely by the news that NetSuite Inc., the fast-growing software-as-a-service giant, is shifting its operations to Microsoft Azure from Amazon’s rival platform. The transition, which is set to complete by the end of the year, is an important symbolic win for Microsoft and also an opportunity to serve the infrastructure requirements of the more than 24,000 customers who use NetSuite’s ERP/CRM platform.
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