Intel on Tuesday announced two programs as part of its $US100 million initiative to boost the development of electronic-business software for servers based on Intel processors. One of the initiatives involves the opening of Intel Solution Centers in the US, Europe and Asia, which the company first mentioned in February, while the other program is known as the Intel Server Applications Enabling Program.
The US chip giant made the announcement at the PC Expo show taking place in New York this week.
Intel initially talked about the establishment of e-Business Solution Centres at its Developer Forum in February, saying that the centres would act as interoperability laboratories for tuning e-business stacks based on its 32-bit and 64-bit Intel Architecture (IA) chips.
Equipped with hardware, software and testing and engineering services, Intel's Solution Centres will offer tried-and-tested integrated turnkey e-business stacks through partnerships with IT companies including Microsoft, testing specialist Rational Software, storage company EMC and Hewlett-Packard, Intel said in a statement issued Tuesday. Customers can then build upon the stacks -- which pull together server hardware, operating systems, middleware, database and e-business application suites -- to create their own e-business systems.
Intel is opening the first US Solutions Centres in Santa Clara, California; Chantilly, Virginia, and DuPont, Washington, the vendor said. It has plans to open similar centers in Paris and Amsterdam, as well as Reading, England; Paris; Munich; Germany, and Stockholm. Intel first mentioned plans to open the European centers in April. In the Asia-Pacific region, the chip maker hopes to open Solution Centres in China and India.
The idea of the Intel Server Applications Enabling program is to provide e-business server application "recipes" to system makers as a way to attune the process of designing and building servers to the needs of such applications, Intel said. The program would also aim to simplify the integration of a variety of different servers.
Intel customers signing up for the program will obtain a year of maintenance and support related to e-business server implementations along with access to on-site technical and marketing support. Assisting Intel in the program in terms of developing, testing and document server application recipes are the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and Linux distributor Red Hat.