When Alphabet Inc. launched a cloud monitoring tool in March that works not only with its own infrastructure-as-a-service platform but also Amazon Inc.’s, it unwittingly started a trend. In response, Jeff Bezos’ firm rolled out a new version of its AWS command line client last week that similarly provides the ability to coordinate management activities across providers.

Administrators are now able to now centrally install patches, access operational logs and control instance behavior throughout all of their cloud environments instead of having to use a separate tool for each. Moreover, Amazon’s client can also be made to work with traditional in-house infrastructure by installing a relatively simple server agent on the target servers. The company says that it supports both bare-metal and virtualized machines running popular hypervisors like VMware Inc.’s vSphere. The functionality is designed to make AWS more appealing to organizations that employ a mix of on- and off-premise resources in a hybrid cloud arrangement, a segment Box Inc. is courting as well.

The file sharing giant last week launched a service called Shuttle for syncing the contents of in-house storage equipment to its cloud platform. Every customer can tailor the migration process to its specific requirements with help from Box’s professional services arm. For instance, financial institutions can have sensitive files automatically deleted after a certain period of time. Meanwhile, a manufacturer might want to organize technical documents based on what components they describe. 

Box’s update came against the backdrop of fellow cloud giant Workday Inc. buying education startup Zaption Inc. to bolster its upcoming employee training platform. The four-year-old outfit created a platform for sharing instructional videos that makes it possible to embed questions, images and other custom content in every clip. The service also sports an analytics dashboard that tracks everything from the number of people who have taken a certain course to their satisfaction levels, information that can be used to optimize engagement.

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