The past week was made particularly interesting for the cloud industry thanks to the diversity of some of the more noticeable updates we picked up.

The first highlight comes from Totango, an analytics-as-a-service that caters specially to the aaS market. The concept does stand out in the crowd. For a monthly subscription cloud providers can optimize user engagement using the insights Totango extracts from their traffic data. One client is Zendesk, which published a case study covering some precise figures and stats concerning its post-analytics improvement.

The second mention in our weekly roundup is that of Cisco’s grand enterprise communications plan. The networking giant has added a lot of different components to this portfolio – and removed a few too – over the years, and now it plans to integrate it all to achieve a more appealing lineup overall. That includes WebEx, Jabber and other services and products that will presumably work much better together. The project is still in the works, and is only known for now as Futurama.

Clio also had some big news, all the way back in the as-a-service space. The company raised $6 million in funding from a couple of new investors, as well as its old ones, for its specialized cloud offering. Clio is targeting lawyers, specifically small firms and individual attorneys that don’t have the budget to setup an IT infrastructure to meet their needs. Instead, the startup offers a much cheaper alternative that’s tailored for this market.

Amazon is also pushing into a new frontier. Its Storage Gateway  hybrid cloud service has potential to get to customers leveraging legacy IT, which is a very big market opportunity even from the Amazon Web Services point of view.