This week featured EMC World 2012, the storage giant’s annual conference that, as promised, managed to outdo last year with nothing short of 42 new product announcements, as well as other updates. Here’s a couple highlights:

On Wednesday, EMC and open source automation firm Puppet Labs unveiled the result of their latest collaboration. Razor is an open provisioning tool for cloud environments that automatically detects all the hardware in a deployment, making the whole process less tedious and considerably more efficient.

Just two days before the debut, during Day 1 of the gathering EMC announced that it has acquired Syncplicity. The firm offers a hosted collaboration service that doesn’t exactly fit in with its new parent company’s core business, but it may just prove a good investment, thanks to sheer demand. Chief exec Joe Tucci made a point of emphasized how popular public cloud services are among enterprise.

In turn, SAP made an acquisition of its own this week. The BI software maker announced that it’s buying Ariba for the humble price of $4.3 billion, 20 percent more than what the latter firm’s stock was worth before the news hit the printers.  Ariba offers commerce services and related offerings that will significantly extend SAP’s cloud line-up, in a time when this segment is really starting to matter from a competitor standpoint.

Last but not least, this week Geoloqi launched on Titanium. The developer solution allows app creates to incorporate geolocation-based features into their offerings, from more targeted advertising to more accurate analytics. All in all this is a big boost to the Titanium ecosystem, and AppSense extended a warm welcome to the latest third party vendor that decided to support its development platform.