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Intel Certification Available as a Service
By Alex Handy

August 20, 2008 — In April, Intel and SpikeSource began to offer certification as a service. Today, the two companies officially brought this offering out of the shadows and into the daylight. With the announcement that 100 software companies have already signed up to use the service, Intel and SpikeSource showed that their vision of platform certification as a service can work, and it will eventually become available to enterprise developers.

Jamshed Patel, vice president of alliances at SpikeSource, said that this is the first major certification as a service program offered by a major technology company. “Intel is pursuing a strategy to enable thousands of ISVs to be enabled on Intel technologies. To make this possible in a scalable way, Intel needs a highly scalable platform that can reach out in a programmatic way and enable ISVs to be certified on these technologies,” said Patel. “We rolled out the SpikeSource Solutions Factory Platform to enable ISVs to develop applications in a way that promotes scalability on Intel's platform. At the end of the process, they receive an Intel badge.”

By day, SpikeSource, which is funded by Intel Capital, sells a service that tracks the evolution of open-source software stacks. The company keeps a watchful eye on oodles of projects, scanning for updates, bugs and changes, then notifies subscribers of them. Intel built its certification platform on top of software stacks maintained by SpikeSource.

Perhaps the most useful aspect of certification as a service is the ability of this platform to certify applications on multicore processors. The program automatically evaluates application dependencies and coding to determine whether or not the software is up to snuff on current and next-generation Intel hardware. For US$25,000 a year, ISVs can push their applications through the certification process, then offer their software as Intel certified, provided it passes muster.

Patel said that, currently, a range of ISVs is using the service, with NEC and Symantec among them. He said that the future of certification as a service should include many more vendors, both large and small.

While the service is currently only offered to ISVs, Patel did say that the future will likely hold an enterprise version. “That's a future product direction, yes,” said Patel when asked about enterprise certifications. “We have had a lot of interest from enterprises, both in the past and currently, in the platform. There may be a point in time when they may be able to more directly access these services.”

Related Search Term(s): multicore, Intel, SpikeSource

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