As enterprises continue to move more workloads and data outside the firewall, cloud providers are stepping up their efforts to monetize the trend. Google set the pace last week by launching a speedy new iteration of its managed relational store that promises to provide seven times better performance than its successor.

The web giant also increased the amount of data that can be kept in deployments from 500 terabytes to a massive 10 terabytes, a major boon for organizations with a lot of records to process. But not every type of record fits well into a relational system, which is why Google rolled out its complementary NoSQL store and data warehouse into general availability alongside the upgrade. And it updated its Nearline cold storage service too in the background to make archived files more easily accessible.

The new additions should help significantly increase the appeal of Google’s public cloud, but it’s facing fierce competition from rivals such as Amazon and IBM that have historically been better at courting enterprises. Big Blue pressed its advantage last week by closing a seven-year hosting deal with Workday Inc., a publicly-traded HR automation provider with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. The agreement will see the latter company migrate its development environment to IBM’s data centers from the ragtag internal infrastructure that it has used until now, which combined in-house hardware with some remote AWS resources.

Meanwhile in the software-as-a-service segment, a  startup by the name of Dexter Inc. marked a win of its own. The outfit raised $2.3 million in funding from Rakuten Ventures, Social Starts and Betaworks to drive the adoption of its managed bot building service, which makes it possible to create chat-based AIs without writing any code. It also allows users to host their creations on the startup’s infrastructure and add integrations with third party services to provide value-added functionality that they can’t implement on their own.

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