Last week saw some of the more traditional players in the public cloud move outside their comfort zone to explore new ways of gaining market share. SAP SA led the charge with the introduction of an enterprise-oriented advertising network that runs on its in-memory HANA database.

The service makes it possible to purchase media space from select publishers through a direct buying mechanism that SAP says can help brands ensure they receive the most out contracts. From there, marketers are able to customize how promotions are delivered based on consumer data supplied by the vendor and track campaign performance via a built-in monitoring console. The software giant hopes that the functionality will enhance the appeal of its managed sales automation portfolio, which is coming under increasing competition from old rivals like IBM Corp. that are also expanding their cloud businesses.

The latter is splitting its efforts between the software- and infrastructure-as-a-service segment, where it competes against much better established players like AWS. To try and level the playing field, Big Blue last week became the first provider to support Nvidia Corp.’s new Tesla M60 GPUs. A single chip from the series is reportedly capable of supporting up to 32 virtual desktops when used with the semiconductor maker’s GRID 2.0 performance optimization software. That means organizations with a lot of end-users to support can fit more instances on a given server and thereby end up having to rent less gear from IBM.

The Tesla M60 support was added on the same day that Apprenda Inc. bolstered its own cloud platform with the acquisition of Kismatic Inc., a provider of commercial support for Docker and Kubernetes. The talent that the platform-as-a-service provider is gaining from the acquisition will enable it to better accommodate large-scale container clusters, which are rapidly growing in number as adoption of the technology continues to increase among enterprises. No financial terms were disclosed for the deal.

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