Throughout the past week we’ve seen some major announcements from the biggest players in the cloud space, and Juniper and Cisco were at the center of attention once more. Juniper Networks yesterday launched the scalability-focused Converged Supercore offerings suit, an integrated end-to-end optical packet transport solution. Both the optical layer and packet layer run on Juniper’s Junos network OS, and aims to deliver a more cost-efficiency solution than the circuit switching model.

Juniper’s Converged Supercore comes a few days after Cisco unveiled the Cisco Jabber UC app, which centralizes several messaging and collaboration functions. These include IM,  voice communications with or without video, desktop sharing and conferencing. The cross-platform app is designed for use on Windows, iOS, Symbian, Android and BBOS, and can integrate with Cisco Unified IP Phones, Cisco WebEx® MeetingCenter and Cisco TelePresence video endpoints.

In addition to Juniper and Cisco, IBM also had some big news – the company is introducing a new virtual server image creation and virtual environments/hybrid cloud automation software as an open beta. The scalable offering reduces the image creation process to a matter of minutes, and also improves the security of data stored in the cloud. IBM also introduced some new features to Tivoli Provisioning Manager, which include support for image federation and deployment across heterogenous infrastructure.

This past week brought quite a bit of updates and product releases, from Akamai and CloudOps as well. Starting with Akamai, the cloud optimization company has launched Electronic Software Delivery for Gaming, a download speed increase solution designed specifically for game publisher. The delivery system combines Akamai Download Manager, Akamai Download Analytics and HTTP deliver and supports just about every game type and model on the market. Moving on to CloudOps, the cloud applications migrating, optimizing, and running solutions provider recently announced the general availability of its new Cloud Migration Services.