The cloud witnessed a predictable post-holiday surge in activity last week as players from every corner of the ecosystem scrambled to make up for the lost time. Blue Box Inc., one of the last remaining pure-play OpenStack hosting providers, set the pace on Tuesday by raising an additional $4 million in a second round of funding that saw a mysterious carrier join as a strategic investor.

The move signals a potential acquisition in the Seattle-based company’s future, given that members of its executive team also contributed to the round. That hints towards an exit on the horizon, especially if the mystery carrier ends up fighting a bidding war with another unnamed strategic investor that came aboard in the first leg of the $14 million round, an entirely likely prospect in the current industry eliminate.

Big industry players have picked up no fewer than three other fast-rising players in the OpenStack ecosystem over the last three months. But while some vendors see acquisitions as their best ticket into the cloud race, others are opting to double down on organic growth instead.

That’s the strategy IBM is pursuing with its $1.2 billion plan to establish 40 data centers around the world for its SoftLayer cloud infrastructure service. That journey took it to Germany last week, where the newest facility came online in Frankfurt. The expansion will provide the enterprise technology stalwart with better access to Europe’s largest economy, which boasts strict privacy protections that place strong limitations on where organizations can take their data. Maintaining a local presence addresses many of those hurdles.

The facility puts IBM ahead of rivals such as Microsoft in the size of local footprints around the globe, but the Redmond giant is gaining ground on other fronts. company reacted to the recent upgrades for Amazon Web Services on Thursday with the introduction of a service called Azure Key Vault that enables organizations to encrypt their cloud applications to the same level as on-premise hardware security modules allow.

Joining the solution is a new class of instances that Microsoft describes as the biggest in the class with up to 32 virtual processors, 448 gigabytes of memory and 6.59 terabytes of flash storage per machine. Rounding out the upgrade is the launch of Docker-integrated Ubuntu images on the Azure Marketplace.