This past week or so we’ve had a couple of product announcements from three major players in the industry, in addition to two milestone rounds of funding in two smaller companies.

SAP announced a major partnership with Google to integrate its ByDesign suite with Google Apps. The agreement has several aspects to it, representing a big leap for the business software both in the cloud and mobile areas among other things.

The integration between the two as-a-service solutions will go deeper than just an API link, providing a bigger incentive to prospects. In addition the Google App Engine will be thrown in the mix, appealing to Android developers that use the PaaS.

VMware also strengthened its product portfolio with the introduction of VMware View clients for three new major platforms – Mac, Linux and Amazon’s popular Kindle Fire. The EMC unit is pushing into the user virtualization space with new initiatives, with this one being one of the latest.

One of the big plus sides of the cloud and key drivers of adoption is economics,  an area that at least one startup is looking to tap on a whole new level. Cloudability, which raised $1.1 million in seed funding this week, offers such a solution: a monitoring app that plugs in to an enterprise user’s cloud service accounts and looks into how much is being spent. This helps prevent over-usage and low utilization on yet another level.

Another company that received new capital is Xeround, now officially a cloud firm. After raising $9 million from investors including Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership, Xeround is bringing its database management software to the public cloud. The decision to do so has been made by the company about two years ago, and the new capital will help to finally start beefing up its cloud strategy.