Public cloud adoption is continuing apace in the enterprise. Box founding CEO Aaron Levie revealed this week that his firm has signed up General Electric as a customer, which means that the mega-conglomerate’s more than 300,000 employees will now be using its platform for file sharing and collaboration.

The deal represents a major vote of confidence in both Box and the public cloud as a whole, not only because GE happens to be one of the world’s largest corporations but also because it has a significant global infrastructure presence and a track record in pushing the envelope on data center design. And despite all of that, CIO Jamie Miller decided that her end-users and bottom line would be best served by Box, a stamp of approval that will no doubt give the firm a big market boost moving forward. It certainly needs it.

Rival Google is aggressively building out its software-as-a-service portfolio, most recently acquiring Boston’s Stackdriver, a two-year-old cloud monitoring startup founded by two former VMware employees. The firm’s service, which is available on the search giant’s public cloud platform as well as AWS and Rackspace, harnesses analytics to provide visibility into application performance and optimization opportunities.  Google said that it intends to make the capabilities  of Stackdriver available on-premise in the future, a move that comes as traditional data center vendors increasingly look to the hybrid cloud for ways to differentiate from infrastructure-as-a-service kingpin Amazon.

Hewlett-Packard recently revealed plans to invest $1 billion in the development of cloud services over the next two years. As part of the initiative, the vendor introduced its very own OpenStack distribution and a new family of cloud services, but it remains committed to its core data center business.  QLogic announced on Wednesday that its NetXtreme II controllers have been selected by HP to power the Virtual Connect FlexFabric 20Gb Ethernet adapters for converged private cloud environments.

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