The cloud-based productivity camp stole back the spotlight from the infrastructure-as-a-service titans last week after Dropbox Inc. relaunched the group messaging service gained through its acquisition of stealth startup Zulip Inc. under a free license. The move marks the latest twist in its long-running love affair with the open-source ecosystem.

The file sharing giant has previously released the code for Hackpad, a collaborative note-taking app likewise gained through the purchase of a rival last year. Zulip complements the capabilities of the mobile tool with Android and iOS clients that allow users to check which of their peers are online and start team-wide project discussions using its built-in code sharing option.

That focus on collaboration underscores Dropbox’s increasing efforts to take its value proposition beyond merely cheap online storage, which have proven to be something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, the company is successfully clinging onto its spot at the top of the cloud food chain, but on the other, every new feature translates into more competitors that need fending off.

And thus Dropbox has found itself pitted against a small army of emerging productivity startups like China’s Teambition, which raised $12 million in funding against the backdrop of the Zulip release to speed up the development of its cloud-based productivity suite. It’s a mesh between a file locker, a task allocation tool and a calendar with some messaging features strewn on top.

With Dropbox and dozens of other vendors competing in the same niche, Teambition is an underdog if there ever was one, the same situation that Google Inc. has found itself in the public cloud. The search giant hopes to mitigate that somewhat with the managed analytics service that rolled out to its infrastructure-as-a-service platform last week to provide pre-implemented Hadoop and Spark clusters on-demand.

The addition aims to counter Amazon Inc.’s Elastic MapReduce, which supports both of the technologies, and to a lesser extent Microsoft’s HDInsight. The two rivaling services have been around for several years now, a head start that has given their respective operators a sizable lead Google will need be creative in tackling.

Photo via hongmyeon