This past week in the cloud brought us a broad spectrum of developments from just about every corner of the cloud.

The first highlight comes from Apple’s upcoming iCloud, a music service similar to that of Amazon’s Cloud Drive. The difference between the two, though, is that Apple seems to have the upper hand in landing the necessary deals. The electronics giant signed up four of the biggest names in the industry, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Group, to its music streaming service.

Along with Apple’s big announcement, the New York Stock Exchange also had a major cloud development of its own. It launched the Capital Markets Community Platform. The offering lets users access NYSE Technologies’ SuperFeed, the Risk Management Gateway (RMG) and Managed Services Hub as well as other from the cloud on an on-demand basis. Existing customers include Quantitative Trading and Millennium Management LLC, among others.

NYSE is expanding its cloud market share in the financial sector, though other companies are doing so on a cross-industry, international scale. Cisco and EMC are two examples – the technology giants launched their Cloud Experience Centers in Bangalore, India. The EMC Centre of Excellence and at the Cisco Globalization Centre East are housed in a single facility, and enable customers to test-drive Cisco and EMC products.

This week we’ve had some VMware news as well. As a part of a fairly long shopping spree that has been going on in the past few months, VMware has acquired SocialCast. SocialCast brings together enterprise applicants such as Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook, a microblogging toll and a forum tool into a collaborative offering. This offering is available on a hosted basis, as a private cloud deployment or on-premise on a VM. The acquisition will help expand VMware’s offering portfolio, and promote some of its goals around VDI.