The past few days were an exciting period for both the enterprise and consumer space. VMware made a major acquisition, a password management startup existed stealth with $15 million in the bank, and Cisco announced record quarterly earnings.

On Monday SiliconAngle founder and CEO John Furrier reported that VMware acquired Virsto, a California-based developer of storage management software for virtualized environments.  The deal gets VMware technology that it will be able incorporate into its solutions in order to drive down IO latency and add previously unavailable storage capabilities.

On Tuesday, Oppenheimer’s Tim Horan proposed that Amazon should spin off its cloud business. The analyst wrote that an independent, publicly-traded AWS is “inevitable due to its channel conflicts and the need to gain scale.” A recently-funded startup called Nok Nok Labs surfaced on the same day Horan published his comments. The company made its debut by rolling out a free authentication protocol that replaces text-based passwords with voice recognition and fingerprint scanning.

The kind of technology that Nok Nok is touting has been available on mobile devices for several years now, but it never really took off in the IT department. CEO Philip Dunkelberger sees a huge opportunity here, and he wants to get as many businesses using his company’s technology before the launch of their commercial product next month.

On Thursday, networking equipment maker Cisco held its earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2012. The bottom line: profits were up 44 percent, and revenue climbed by 5 percent from a year earlier.

The vendor expects things to cool down a bit in the coming quarters, but chief executive John Chambers still believes “solid progress” will be made “toward our goal of becoming the number one IT company in the world.”