As the title highlights, a few rather significant updates poured in this past week from the as-a-service, industry in addition to other areas.  For starters, the Salesforce.com-owned Heroku introduced a new database-as-a-service for the open PostGres DB.  The news is that for $200 a month this is available as a standalone service, building on the success of Salesforce’s existing Oracle-based Database.com service.

More and more PaaS providers are offering DBaaS options for their customers, and the Heroku announcement marks the latest milestone passed by the industry.  Something similar can be said of ActiveState’s announcement–the Stackato Micro Cloud for developers will remain free even after it will come out of beta.  Stackato is based on VMware’s open-source Cloud Foundry, and ActiveState is making its offering more accessible to the community (and to potential paying users that may want a more thorough test run).

Alongside Engine Yard’s release of an experimental environment that serves a similar function as Google Labs, EMC rolled out v4.1 of the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform this week.  The latest version of the cloud-based version of its storage management platform features several notable improvements such as Linux support and more customization. Klint Finley took the opportunity to take a deeper look into the state of the as-a-service industry, and where EMC fits in.

In addition to cloud providers, several companies working on the mobile side of the cloud space also had a few updates. Wyse, for one, acquired mobile management platform provider Trellia in order to enrich its existing portfolio of mobile cloud and user virtualization apps. Cisco had also made a push to expand its presence in the mobile industry, introducing A web-based versions of two of its enterprise collaboration applications at the Cisco Collaboration Summit in Miami.