Microsoft is working with the world’s two largest laptop manufacturers, Taiwan’s Quanta Computing and Compal Electronics, to develop server hardware for use in highly virtualised, elastically scalable cloud computing environments.
The software giant revealed at this week’s Computex conference in Taipei that it will share patents with the hardware makers, both of which build devices for most well known laptop brands.
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The joint development work has sprung out of a cloud computing ‘center of excellence’ that Microsoft established in Taiwan last year, in conjunction with the country’s Ministry of Economic Affairs.
The initiative reveals the intention of Taiwan’s high tech manufacturing industry to exploit the rise of cloud computing. “Cloud computing services are a strategic industry that the government is promoting,” said the ministry’s director general Wu Ming-ji at Computex.
A number of IT companies are investing in cloud facilities in the Far East. IBM’s cloud facility in Wuxi, China, for example, offers local software developers a platform on which offer their applications as web-based services, and provides IBM with an opportunity to capitalise on China’s fast growing economy.
