Alone, an independent infrastructure-as-a-service vendor has no hope of competing with Amazon on pricing or scale, but a coalition of small firms working in tandem to overthrow the retail giant may just have a fighting chance. That’s the thinking behind the OnApp Federation, a newly established network of some 167 providers from 43 countries that merges nearly 200 data centers into unified public cloud environment that comfortably ranks as the largest in the world.

The heart of the platform is an online marketplace that participating companies, most of whom are regional players with just one or two facilities, can use to buy hardware resources from one another as the need to do so arises. That effectively extends the reach of members across the globe at only a tiny fraction of the cost it took Amazon to build out a comparably wide presence on its own.

Although it competes with the e-commerce titan in the infrastructure-as-a-service space, the old proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” doesn’t apply in the case of Microsoft, which has also found itself in the sights of OnApp. But the software stalwart is not putting all of its eggs in one cloud basket and is actively pursuing other revenue streams besides selling commodity hardware resources.

As part of that effort, Microsoft recently unveiled two new initiatives designed to provide much-needed transparency around its Office 365 managed productivity suite. The company is rolling out a web service containing regular updates about its  development roadmap and a complementary program dubbed First Release that allows users to sign up for early access to new features at least two weeks before they become general available.

Meanwhile, Microsoft rival Box announced this week that it has acquired Streem, a Y-Combinator-backed startup that lets users to stream content from the cloud without having to store any data locally.  Rather than storing files on the user’s hard drive, the company’s service secures pulls information from the cloud on-demand. Box didn’t say how much it paid for the firm, but it did divulge that the deal involved a mix of cash and stock and that the transaction is expected to close in the coming weeks.

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