This past week, two software-defined networking startups announced multi-million dollar funding rounds, and several vendors unveiled new cloud solutions in an attempt to expand into new markets.

Big Switch Networks received $20 million from Intel Capital.  The startup sells network virtualization software that serves both as an abstraction layer and as an application framework for its other solutions, which focus on making efficient use of hardware infrastructure.

Intel is investing in SDN to establish a foothold before this market takes off – the exact same reason Cisco is also pumping money into this segment. The vendor injected $8 million into Piston Cloud on Tuesday, raising the company’s total funding to an impressive $13 million.

Piston is a commercial distributor of OpenStack, a widely-used open source cloud platform that spans the entire stack. One of the many components that fall under the OpenStack umbrella is Quantum, a solution that simplifies the management of virtualized networking resources within SDN environments – the kind of thing that Cisco finds interesting.

Over in Brazil, EMC and long time business partner Capgemini announced that they will be offering a set of cloud services to enterprise customers in the region. The line-up includes backup and archive as a service, as well as SaaS solutions such as a hosted SAP environment and a remote content management system. The Brazilian cloud market is growing like crazy, and the two firms are getting in on the action before everybody else.

Also this week, Druva announced an on-premise edition of its file management platform and OnLive leaked plans to enable cloud streaming for massively multiplayer online games.    The sheer amount of physical resources needed to support such a service would have made it impossible to operate cost-efficiency just a few years ago, but now OnLive is in a position to make it happen.