The cloud is expanding in all directions, with end users embracing on-demand software en mass and enterprises increasingly abstracting their traditional IT environments for enhanced provisioning and resource utilization. OpenStack is at the forefront of the latter trend, eliminating proprietary hardware and software requirements to create highly automated pools of compute that can be managed and allocated more easily than before.

The project has gained considerable steam thanks to broad ecosystem support, notably from traditional vendors seeking to push back against the public cloud. Red Hat, the enterprise Linux company, is looking to cement its position with OpenStack Platform 4.0, a newly launched distribution that is specifically designed for powering open cloud environments. The software features full support for the Havana release of OpenStack, including the Neutron software-defined networking component and the Heat orchestration engine. Also included is the Foreman provisioning tool, which is complemented by integration with Red Hat’s Cloudforms management tool and Storage Server solution.

OpenStack Platform 4.0 was announced shortly after IBM released a Resource Scheduler that enables users to automate workload allocation in large-scale deployments of the cloud operating system.

While Red Hat and Big Blue are pushing OpenStack, China’s Alibaba Group is taking Amazon Web Services head on. Zhang Jing, the director of the ecommerce giant’s cloud business, revealed this week that his division will soon expand to North America in a bid to attract foreign customers and offer a broader value proposition to Chinese companies with international operations.

Oracle, meanwhile, is repositioning against Salesforce with the $1.5 billion acquisition of Responsys, a provider of cloud-based marketing software with over 450 customers. The firm’s technology will be integrated into Eloqua, the automation component of the database giant’s Customer Experience Cloud.