Intel launches marketing campaign aimed at cloud

By Noel Randewich

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Chipmaker Intel Corp is taking its long-running Intel Inside marketing campaign into cloud computing in a bid to head off competition from smaller rivals designing low-power chips for servers.

Intel (Berlin: INL.BE - news) said on Wednesday that providers of data-center services would begin offering their customers details about the Intel chips used to power their servers - helping those customers make better buying decisions.

Intel controls nearly all of the server market and is determined not to cede ground to Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD - news) and other companies developing energy-efficient server chips based on technology from Britain's ARM Holdings (LSE: ARM.L - news) .

"Strengthening awareness of the quality, features and impact of Intel technologies within (cloud providers') infrastructure highlights the challenge competing vendors and architectures will have," Intel marketing director Raejeanne Skillern said in an interview.

The "Intel Cloud Technology" campaign expands on an agreement last year with Amazon Web Services to provide the specifications about the various kinds of Intel chips used in services offered by AWS.

Last week, Qualcomm Inc's soon-to-be chief executive, Steve Mollenkopf, said data centers presented an opportunity for the smartphone chipmaker and hinted that the company might develop components for low-power servers.

Rackspace, Virtustream and other data center service providers have signed onto Intel's cloud marketing campaign, the chipmaker said.