There were several news highlights from this week coming out of the cloud space, and VMware and the personal cloud were the center of attention. This is partially because VMware Europe was held in Copenhagen from October 18-20.

The first update comes from VMware parent company EMC, which announced EMC’s Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning 3.0. The latest version of IUM/P offers much tighter integration with vCloud Director and vCenter Server for VCE customers. Thanks to this update Vblock provisioning got simplified in addition to getting a performance boost, allowing deployments to be scaled non-disruptively.

This development was announced a day after VMware extended the functionality of its VMware Go Pro cloud-based IT management system. Among the things that are getting an upgrade is the SaaS’s patch management system, which will make it even more competitive with Spiceworks: VMware’s free on-premise management software. Go Pro is priced at $12 a year per system covered.

On the same day, VMware had its earnings call. The company’s revenues were up 31.9 percent to $941.9 million, beating Wall Street’s average forecast.  SiliconANGLE’s Alex Williams dug a little deeper by taking a look into the services market as a whole: He noted the cloud-driven industry shift in a comparison with IBM’s earnings call on the same day, a traditional IT provider that didn’t live up to expectations this quarter.

VMware’s growth can be partially credited to a number of cloud ventures, as well as a constantly expanding ecosystem that’s pushing in this direction as well.

VMware had a lot of developments this week, though several other companies also got a fair share of the headlines. Zend for one launched a PHP platform-as-a-service called PHPCloud.com at ZenCon, an offering that marks the open-source solutions provider’s first cloud venture.

Alongside the launch of PHPCloud, personal cloud storage firm Dropbox had some good news. On October 18 they announced the closure of a massive $250 million finding round.