History has proven time and again that however saturated, a market will always have room for a new player to disrupt the status quo. On the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) front, Ericsson is betting big that this force of change will emerge in the form of Apcera Inc., a startup that broke into the scene last week with a policy engine for configuring and running cloud applications.

The technology draws on the lessons that founder Derek Collison learned during his stint as CTO at VMware Inc., where he played an instrumental role in the development Cloud Foundry, the open-source project at the epicenter of the PaaS craze. The entrepreneur has identified a need for a solution that goes a step farther than the platform he helped create and others like it with capabilities extending deep into the management workflow, an opening Apcera is trying to fill with its flagship Continuum software.

The newly launched offering abstracts the complex mishmash of requirements that have to be addressed before an app is ready for launch into a set of clearly-defined policies that users can configure through the built-in graphic interface. That radically simplified approach is what caught Erickson’s attention and eventually led the Swedish telecom giant to acquire a majority stake in Apcera as part of a transaction revealed on the same morning that Continuum made its debut.

Salesforce.com Inc. followed up the launch of the would-be next big thing in platform-as-a-service with a new cloud solution of its own that it hopes will have an equally disruptive impact on a much narrower but no less significant market: the academia. Developed under its philanthropy program, the new Salesforce1 for Higher Ed suite packs five services geared towards the specific needs of universities, from bridging the communications gap between students and faculty to optimizing the dollar value of alumni over a generational period.

The bundle also includes more generic solutions such as a communication engagement platform designed to enable collaborative study and a marketing component for attracting prospective students. Complementing the lineup is a mobile app developed with help from a partner called roundCorner Inc. that Salesforce says can enable administrators to “fundraise from any device” and make their voices heard through online channels such as social media.

Similar functionality can be found in the latest edition of Odoo, the cloud-based enterprise resource management suite previously known as OpenERP and originally branded Tiny ERP that now stands at version 8.0. Among other enhancements, the newly introduced release packs a collection of “Marketing Apps” that provide ways for connecting with customers via various digital mediums, including live chat, email and surveys.

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