The top cloud providers continue investing aggressively in feature development to stay ahead of the market. Microsoft Corp. set the pace for the industry last week by revealing plans to merge its popular sales automation and resource management services into a single suite called Dynamics 365. According to the official blog post in which the news was announced, the bundle will consist of eight modules each dedicated to a different business task.

The list of supported functions includes accounting, project management and other core back office chores as well as consumer-facing activities like managing marketing campaigns. Microsoft plans on making the apps in Dynamics 365 available individually to ease purchase, but will keep them linked under the hood via a shared data management model. The feature is aimed mainly at making it easier for developers to extend the suite with custom functionality, which can include everything from third party integrations to entire bespoke apps.

Courting the developer crowd is not coincidently also a priority for Google, Microsoft Corp.’s biggest rival in the cloud-based productivity space. The search giant boasts an extensive set of application services including managed databases, monitoring tools and even an object recognition engine called Cloud Vision API. In a sign of the lineup’s importance, the company last week acquired a French startup called Moodstocks SAS that has developed a competing image processing system. The outfit’s staff and technology will be absorbed by the Alphabet subsidary’s Paris branch to accelerate product development efforts.

The move was announced against the backdrop of Pivotal Software Inc. bolstering its own platform-as-a-service stack by adding support for Ubuntu. The feature is the result of a partnership with Canonical Ltd. that will also see the companies collaborate on certifying the operating system for use in government private clouds. In particular, they’ll be focusing on bringing the software up to snuff with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency’s STIG standard and the more widely-used CIS Benchmarks.

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