Cisco’s CTO of Engineering Dave Ward Live In theCUBE

The war over the public cloud moved up several notches in the past week after top enterprise vendors made a series of landmark advances that significantly raise the stakes for market leader Amazon.com Inc. as it works to capture a bigger slice of enterprise technology spending.

Cisco Systems Inc. set the pace on Monday with a pledge to commit another billion dollars towards its plan of establishing a global cloud network that unifies services from different partners under a federated model guaranteeing interoperability and consistent uptime. Originally nothing more than a response to similar nine-digital investments from IBM and a number of other industry leaders, the so-called Intercloud has taken on an entirely new dimension of its own both in scope and scale.

As part of the expansion, Cisco also signed up more than 30 additional service providers for its platform, including consultancy powerhouse Wipro Ltd., Deutsche Telekom AG and Equinix Inc., a top colocation firm that is trying to build its own federated cloud network. The companies join an already formidable list of partners that features big names like Google, Microsoft Corp. and software-as-a-service stalwart Salesforce.com Inc., which also made headlines last week after debuting a new onramp program for resource-strapped startups.

Designed to snag customers as early in as their lifespan as possible, the initiative offers a generous package of freebies for emerging firms. The bundle includes one year of free access to the Salesforce1 mobile development environment along with a one-year subscription to the company’s flagship customer relationship management (CRM) platform and complementary helpdesk tools. The launch comes a few short weeks after fellow Cisco partner Google introduced a similar onramp program for developers meant to drive the adoption of its infrastructure-as-a-service platform, one of the few on the market large and advanced enough to pose a threat to Amazon’s dominance.

The search giant’s cloud suite returned to the limelight on Thursday when it revealed sweeping price cuts meant to level the playing field against Microsoft, another leading contender for the retail giant’s throne that shaved upwards of 27 percent off service rates last week. Google was more reserved with the response, slashing appropriately 10 percent across all instances and region, but the move nonetheless represents a major step forward in the race to zero. The update is even more significant in the context of Amazon, which has led the industry on pricing for much of its existence but is now seeing Google and Microsoft rapidly close the distance.