It was a busy week in the world of cloud, with earnings reports from two key vendors, plus the announcement of a new partnership and a new vendor product. Here's a look at five news stories of interest to the channel from the week of Oct. 24-28, focusing on key numbers within those stories.

55 percent – Year-over-year gain in sales for Amazon Web Services for its most recent quarter, which ended Sept. 30. AWS notched more than $3.2 billion in sales, compared to just over $2 billion a year earlier. On a trailing nine-month basis, cloud sales were up to $8.6 billion from $5.4 billion in the first three quarters of 2015. However, the company's overall numbers fell short of Wall Street's expectations.

$1.8 billion – Third-quarter sales for VMware, a 6 percent year-over-year improvement, driven by its largest customers doubling down on the core technologies and extending their vSphere deployments, CEO Pat Gelsinger told investors. VMware has been aggressively pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy, enabled by the VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture. The company's partnerships with IBM and Amazon Web Services are driving the hybrid strategy.

$1.39 billion – Sales in the most recent quarter for solution provider giant Insight Enterprises (No. 15 on CRN's Solution Provider 500 list), beating analysts' projections of $1.36 billion. The Tempe, Ariz.-based company credited a growth in cloud computing for a 3.9 percent jump in net earnings.

5,000 – Approximate number of customers for TierPoint, a cloud and managed services provider based in St. Louis that is now part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network following an announcement last week. Tier Point is a VMware shop. The offering allows VMware software-defined data center workloads to run natively on AWS. TierPoint has 39 data centers in 20 different U.S. markets. Earlier in October, VMware and Amazon unveiled a new platform called VMware Cloud on AWS that eliminates the decision of whether to run a private or a public cloud for end customers.

Less than $6,000 – Projected retail price of Jamboard, a digital whiteboard introduced by Google that's designed to foster team collaboration by integrating with its cloud-based software suite. Jamboard, which Google said will be available in 2017, offers a 55-inch screen that users can write on or throw content to from other sources, then save their work in the cloud, according to a blog posted by TJ Varghese, a product manager at Google.