Acquisitions are such a frequent occurrence in the public cloud that it’s almost unusual for a week to go by without some established vendor picking up a smaller player to fill a hole in its portfolio that would be more costly to plug internally. Purchases that fall above the financial disclosure threshold are scarcer and tend to garner quite a bit of attention as a result, and the rare deal that passes the one-billion-dollar can keep pundits buzzing for days.

So when SAP SE revealed on Friday that it’s dropping over $8 billion on a relatively low-profile provider of travel and business expense management services known as Concur Technologies Inc., the market was naturally taken aback. The landmark buyout represents one of the biggest transactions in the history of the industry and puts the German business intelligence giant on course to becoming the second largest enterprise cloud vendor by revenue and number one in terms of total end-users served. The acquisition is expected to close either towards the end of the year or shortly after depending on how fast the paperwork is sorted out.

Consolidation is an inevitable part of any industry’s evolution, but in the public cloud, a vendor can expect to see its spot filled almost instantly – or in the case of Concur, even before its press team managed to put out the release announcing the buyout. Two days before the acquisition was made public, a startup called Formation Data Systems Inc. launched from stealth with $24 million in funding from top Silicon Valley investors and a bold vision for the future of enterprise storage.

The brainchild of former EMC Corp. CTO Mark Lewis and entrepreneur-in-residence Andy Jenks, Formation has cooked up a data management platform that can dynamically take on the properties of whichever system a particular application is designed for, be it an object store like Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-based S3 service or a legacy architecture. That unique approach has earned the company the endorsement of Box Inc. founding CEO Aaron Levie, former Cisco Systems Inc. chief data scientist Charlie Giancarlo and Seagate Technology PLC boss Steve Luczo, to name a few of the industry heavyweights who contributed to the funding.

The day after Formation hit the scene, Centrify Corp. revealed that it too has landed a hefty cash infusion, albeit from an entirely different source. The identify management startup beat the competition to a lucrative licensing agreement with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. under which it’s providing the access control and policy enforcement capabilities for the mobile juggernaut’s new KNOX EMM service. The cloud-based platform is touted as the industry’s most comprehensive solution for managing employee-owned devices, featuring integration with both online user directories and on-premise systems.

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