This week featured several major announcements from a few small firms with big ambitions and a lot of cloud mojo. One of them is Spanning, which hired a Silicon Valley veteran to lead its sales and marketing efforts.

Spanning is Boston-based company that offers back-up services for Google Apps. Its flagship solution, the most popular title in its category on the Google Apps Marketplace, is poised to sell ten times as well this year than it did in 2011. The team also reports a massive increase in recurring revenue.

The responsibility to preserve this momentum now falls on the shoulders of Jeff Erramouspe, the new chief revenue officer who previously served in management positions for both hyper-growth startups and Fortune 500 enterprises.

Also this week, Blue Box raised $3.5 million in a first round of funding. The company, which offers business-grade managed IaaS services, has relied purely on organic growth for nearly a decade – a bet that paid off. Blue Box claims to have over 600 clients, including major publications and media organizations.

Nirvanix, another enterprise cloud startup, also had an update. The company didn’t raise funding or hire a new C-level executive, but achieved something far more noble in  facing Hurricane Sandy. Fearing that the storm may affect its New Jersey data center, Nirvanix gave wary customers the choice of moving their data to its other facilities in the U.S and Europe.

Over in the networking industry, Cisco launched UCS Central for its Unified Computing Systems. The new management software automates workload migration by mirroring configurations across different locations, and simplifies a few other things as well. It’s joined by the latest version of Cisco Intelligent Automation, which now features a cloud-aware utility for admins.