The industry’s top cloud providers regularly release new features and services to stay ahead of the market. Last week, Amazon was revealed to be developing a new type of cloud instance called the P2 as part of its competitive efforts that will be based on Nvidia Corp.’s speedy K80 GPU.

The anonymous insider who leaked word of the project to VentureBeat said that users will be able to configure virtual machines in the series with up 16 graphics cards, 64 vCPUs and 758 GiB of RAM. Seeing how the K80 is marketed as a general-purpose workload accelerator, the instances will likely be able support most of the artificial intelligence and high-performance computing applications that Nvidia’s chips are commonly used for in the enterprise. Amazon is presumably banking on the P2 to up the ante against rivals like IBM Corp. that currently offer a broader variety of GPU-based hardware options to customers.

Meanwhile in the call center automation space, the market leaders are also investing heavily to maintain their competitive positions amid the growing shift to cloud-based solutions. Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc. led the charge last week by signing a $1.4 billion agreement to buy Interactive Intelligence Group Inc., a rival that’s the process of switching to a software-as-a-service business model. The deal will allow the latter company to carry out its plans without pressure from investors while putting Genesys in a better position against competitors like Israel’s Nice Ltd. that are also scaling their operations.

The acquisition was announced against the backdrop of C3 IoT Inc., the startup led by billionaire Thomas Siebel. raising $70 million from a group of backers led by TPG Growth to drive the adoption of its platform-as-a-service offering. What sets the software apart from the numerous alternatives out is that it’s specifically built for powering applications that process machine-generated data. It’s used mainly by utilities and other industrial companies to analyze the logs generated by their infrastructure.

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