This week three areas of the larger cloud industry grabbed headlines, thanks to a handful of major updates from vendors. First, the OpenStack ecosystem reached a new milestone with the release of the first commercial edition into general availability.

Piston Cloud fused Rackspace’s open cloud OS with proprietary components it developed in-house, including a custom Linux distro and scaling technology. The result is Piston Enterprise OS, an enterprise-grade private cloud platform that combines simplicity with interoperability.

In the cloud services space, IBM made quite an entry. The tech industry veteran announced IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, a challenger to Google Apps that offers Lotus functionality in a web-based format. That means collaboration, communications and calendar wrapped up under a new brand name, though it’s one that the enterprise is very familiar with. Meanwhile, Google Apps has been doing some expansion as well.

Partner Unisys brought the 25,000 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration aboard this week, marking the latest contract won by the two companies. It also happens to be the biggest governmental cloud deal to date for Google, and will prove to be a substantial boost to subscription revenue.

While Google is prepping up to face yet another competitor, Amazon Web Services had an update of its own in the PaaS market, which it has been dominating for quite some time now. In the latest price-related gesture towards users, AWS gave a big boost to its free instance in order to appeal to users who run Windows apps and were not able to get at test run before.

The last highlight in this week’s cloud roundup comes from Symantec. The  security software vendor acquired LiveOffice for an undisclosed sum, a maker of cloud storage and archiving solutions  for businesses.