Nearly a decade after cloud computing first reared its head in the enterprise, players like Microsoft Corp. are seeing demand for their services grow as fast as ever, but so is the competition. That is driving an industry-wide race for new ways to differentiate that turned to integrations last week in a sign of the growing importance of accessibility to knowledge workers.

Redmond fired the opening shot with the incorporation of several key capabilities from Skype for Business in Office 365, perhaps most notably the option to handle traditional calls directly within the cloud-based productivity suite. Users also gain the ability to dial into meetings with the same stroke, or, if there are too many participants for that, hold one-way “Town Hall” broadcasts.

Microsoft sees the update as a major step forward towards harmonizing verbal communications with the other core tenants of collaboration in the enterprise, the same vision that AppMesh Inc. hopes to realize for lead assessment over in the world of customer engagement. The third release of its companion application for Salesforce.com Inc.’s ubiquitous cloud-based CRM platform debuted against the backdrop of the Skype integration to try and further that goal.

The startup is targeting the uncertain deals and prospects that salespeople often avoid logging into their organization’s main database for fear of raising the eyre of their supervisors. Other than that, AppMesh’s platform works like any other customer relationship system, sporting features for organizing contacts, collaborating with peers and – once everything is ready – synchronizing all of that activity to Salesforce.com.

But while the cloud giant is content with letting partners fill the gaps in its value proposition, another enterprise technology giant is taking integration into its own hands. Cisco Systems Inc. made major headlines on the day of AppMesh’s launch with the acquisition of OpenDNS Inc. to help fill out its security arsenal.

The $635 million deal is the latest and one of the largest in a string of cloud protection acquisitions that the company has made over recent quarters to branch out beyond its core hardware business. OpenDNS adds essential traffic filtering and monitoring capabilities to the lineup that complement the malware analysis functionality that Cisco obtained through those previous purchases.

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