For service providers, the data center is the key battleground in the cloud revolution, and Midokura is supplying the arms. The San Francisco-based startup offers a solution called MidoNet that wraps an API around networking infrastructure to improve scalability and allow for more consistent management in the kind of large-scale virtual environments operated by cloud vendors and service-oriented enterprises.

Midokura announced this week that it has teamed up with Cumulus to extend its technology to bare-metal switches running the latter’s Linux-based network operating system. As part of the partnership, the companies are collaborating to package their respective products into an integrated solution that will allow users to rapidly provision both virtual and physical networks from a single pane of the glass without having to modify existing workloads. The pair says that the platform, which is expected to hit general availability in the third quarter, will also enable CIOs to avoid buying into specialized appliances from traditional vendors such as Cisco.

Despite the influx of new competitors such as Midokura and Cumulus, the networking stalwart continues to dominate the data center, and it hopes to replicate its success in the enterprise collaboration space with WebEx. At this week’s Enterprise Connect Conference in Orlando, Cisco and Google revealed that the cloud-based videoconferencing solution will be made available on Chromebooks in order to drive adoption of the low-cost notebooks among enterprise workers.

In a presentation at the event, Cisco collaboration head Rowan Trollope and Google’s Rajen Sheth showed off a prototype version of WebEx that runs natively on Chrome OS and provides integration with Google Apps. The day before, Roambi announced that it has integrated its own solution with Box to let users visualize data that lives in the cloud.

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