Qualcomm Technologies Inc. has joined the advisory board of the Xen Project, an initiative that aims to further the development and support of the open-source Xen hypervisor and its related components.

The Xen Project’s advisory board is a group of companies that have pledged their commitment to the “market and technical success of the Xen Project,” and who also “provide financial support, technical contributions, and set high-level policy decisions,” the organization says on its website.

In a press release, Qualcomm said it has joined the Xen Project in order to accelerate ARM-server and hyperscale cloud development. Qualcomm was recently named as one of the top contributors to the latest Xen 4.8 release.

“Qualcomm Technologies is committed to supporting many open source communities that power the foundation of hyperscale cloud computing, including Xen Project,” said Elsie Wahlig, director of product management at Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies. “As an advisory board member and through our code contributions, we are working to continue to make the Xen Project hypervisor a first-class hypervisor for the ARM architecture.”

In a statement, the Xen Project said the company will help assist the project as it works on “fine-tuning the hypervisor for better ARM support to capitalize on new developments with mobile, cloud and web-scale computing.”

Given Qualcomm’s recent announcement of a new 10-nanometer ARM-based chip for servers, it’s not really a surprise that it would want to join Xen in an official capacity. By becoming an influential member of the organization, Qualcomm should have a better chance of directing it in ways that could boost its own business.

ARM-based chips are still relatively unknown in the data center at the moment, however, which means that Qualcomm has a long slog ahead if it’s to make an impact there. Although ARM Ltd., the company that designs and licenses most ARM-based chips, is striving to change that, recent research from International Data Corp. revealed that ARM servers “have yet to make an impact on the server market” and that it had only tracked “minimal revenue” from the market so far.

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