The industry’s top cloud providers are expanding aggressively to try and capture a bigger slice of the market for off-premise technology resources. DigitalOcean Inc. set the pace last week after launching a new data center in Bangalore to make its infrastructure-as-a-service platform more appealing to Indian organizations.

The main benefit of the ability to host application locally is that requests take less time to travel over the network, which can speed up response times significantly. This gives DigitalOcean a valuable edge over rivaling providers like Amazon Inc. that don’t yet have a presence in the region. However, it’s more than likely that Jeff Bezos’ firm will arrive in India too eventually, which is why DigitalOcean intends to press its advantage by adding yet more data centers and features over time.

The effort is fueled by a $130 million credit line that the company took out earlier this year from a group of investment banks. The cash infusion more than doubled the size of DigitalOcean’s war chest, but it’s still dwarfed by the balance sheets of the public cloud’s most well-established players. Among the biggest of the bunch is Salesforce.com Inc., which last week acquired an e-commerce provider called Demandware Inc. for nearly $2.8 billion.

The firm claims that its platform can streamline every major aspect of selling merchandise online, from the task of setting up an appealing e-commerce site to handling payments. The Demandware Commerce Cloud even has a store management tool that enables retailers to coordinate activity across their digital and physical operations. According to Salesforce, the suite will be integrated with its core customer management services to help marketers gain a better understanding of buyers.

The functionality should help the vendor become a lot more competitive against rivaling CRM providers like Microsoft Corp., which in turn is also investing heavily to stay at the head of the pack. Redmond turned its attention to the cloud productivity space last week and introduced a new premium security feature for Office 365 that is capable of automatically detecting unauthorized activity. Each anomaly spotted by its algorithms is assigned a risk score that a company’s administrators can use to determine how they should handle the problem.

Image via Geralt