Partnerships are hardly a rare occurrence in the enterprise technology world, where every system and service are seemingly entwined one way or another, but the alliance between IBM Corp. and Box Inc. announced last week managed to grab the headlines nonetheless. The two giants of their respective segments will collaborate to move cloud computing deeper into the modern workplace.

The effort is set to see Box’s file sharing service – used by more than 45,000 organizations around the world, many of which are IBM customers – integrated into key parts of the latter’s portfolio to help drive mutual adoption. At the same time, the business software giant will make its time-honed content management and analytic capabilities available to its new partner for integration.

Joining forces, the companies hope, will produce a value proposition strong enough to draw away enterprises not only from rivaling clouds also the traditional in-house systems they’ve historically used to provide that functionality for employees. That’s a goal shared by the much of the rest of the industry nowadays , with the notable exception of Replicated Inc., an emerged startup that raised $1.5 million in funding last week to accomplish the exact opposite.

Its namesake technology enables providers to create on-premise versions of their services without the hassle of rebuilding everything from scratch. Replicated allows for  the core cloud capabilities to be shared with the standalone implementation and automates the logistics of delivering that functionality, including most of everything from provisioning hardware to rolling out updates.

The secret sauce is Docker, which the startup uses to package the code in an interoperable format that works equally well with on- and off-premise infrastructure. That’s the same benefit Google Inc. is looking to seize with its new container service it launched into beta the day after Replicated announcing its funding round to help developers take advantage of the functionality.

Rolling out in conjunction is a managed repository for storing master copies of the code that goes into containers, which can range from popular databases and other development components to custom cloud applications like the kind built by Replicated’s customers. Google hopes that the registry will give its service an edge over the numerous rivals that have also thrown their weights behind containerization in recent months.

Photo via Craig Sellars