Cost efficiency and high utilization belong to the list of the top drivers behind enterprise cloud migration, so this area has naturally not been left untapped.  Two different companies have announced updates in this space throughout the past week, including Cloudability.

Cloudability is a new startup that takes high utilization to the next level by eliminating human errors. Its cloud-based solution does that by aggregating expenditure data from the various accounts a company maintains with X-as-a-service providers, and sending out regular alerts and other real-time notifications. This prevents any over-usages from slipping through unnoticed, only to be discovered when the bill is already in.

Cloudability’s concept had enough potential to get the company a $1.1 million investment in a seed funding round.

Open-source solutions take a different approach to ensuring better economics than proprietary alternatives, but cost-effectiveness nevertheless remains a key element in the overall value proposition. OpenLogic’s CloudSwing PaaS focuses on this area by providing a set of cost monitoring tools in addition to ability to fully customize the different stacks. It has built up a client base in a few months and is already expanding outwards, most recently with Rackspace Cloud integration.

Resource optimization in the enterprise cloud is only one of the trends that got the spotlight this week. The big data explosion in the consumer segment is another, and in particular the CDN market.

Akamai has admitted a lag behind the competition earlier in 2011, which resulted in a big decline in its share price. The firm is now following tradition as it tries to pick up the pace by buying a competitor, one that it once sued. Akamai acquired Cotendo for $268 million, missing expectations of a price tag as high as $350 million.