Traditional information technology vendors are investing heavily to try and address the growing adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise. Last week, Oracle Corp. stepped up its efforts by launching a new iteration of its infrastructure-as-a-service platform that promises to provide a competitive alternative to market leader Amazon Web Services.

The database giant hopes to reach this goal by one-upping its rival in key hardware categories. One of the offerings introduced as part of the rollout is an analytics-optimized virtual machine that has ten times the data transfer capacity of Amazon’s largest instance, while a new bare-metal option unveiled in conjunction is claimed to be 20 percent cheaper than the nearest competitor. Oracle also announced the start of a global expansion initiative designed to make its infrastructure-as-a-service platform accessible in more parts of the world.

Barely two days after the launch of the effort, Microsoft Corp. fired back by launching three new Azure data centers of its own in Germany. The move is aimed at increasing the appeal of the public cloud to local organizations that wish to run workloads domestically either because they want to reduce latency or they want to prevent the transfer of data to foreign jurisdictions. Redmond will also host Office 365 instances in the facilities starting from the first quarter of 2017 for the same reason and plans to add the Dynamics 365 to the mix a few months later.

The latter service has won a lot of market share in the customer relationship management space over the past few years, but Salesforce.com Inc. continues to dominate the segment. Mark Benioff’s firm maintains this leadership position with help of an enthusiastic ecosystem of partners that provide additional capabilities for customers.

Among them is Troops Inc., which raised $7 million in funding last week for its sales automation bot. The artificial intelligence enables users to access their Salesforce.com data in Slack and quickly visualize important metrics using natural-language text commands. Additionally, Troops features an alerting mechanism that can be used to generate chat notifications for important developments like the completion of a deal. The startup will spend the new funding on developing additional features to increase the usefulness of its bot even further.

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