Boston Limited, a UK-based IT-solutions vendor, announced an ARM-as-a-Service (AaaS) offering, a cloud-infrastructure service built on ARM processors by Calxeda.

The offering is based on Calxeda's EnergyCore System-on-Chip product, which uses the “wimpy-core” processors licensed from UK's ARM Holdings. ARM's low-power chips dominate the mobile-device market and have recently been picking up pace in server applications.

The AaaS is a platform that provides developers with tools and services required to port and migrate software from x86 servers to the ARM platform. Boston teamed up with software developers Ellexus for its product Breeze, a Linux tracing tool that provides visibility into what an application is doing at he system level as it runs.

"We've been working with ARM for 18 months and we are now extremely excited to be partnering up with one of the stand-out front-runners in the ARM-based server ecosystem, Boston Ltd.

Rosemary Francis, managing director at Ellexus, said the company has been working with ARM for 18 months. “We understand the hardware constraints that many software developers will face in trying to enter the ARM environment, and Boston's cloud offering provides a fantastic opportunity for those wanting to future-proof their applications as more and more users move over to ARM technology."

Boston's Calxeda-based servers are called Viridis Microservers. The AaaS offering provides dedicated physical quad-core nodes. Users will be able to develop on single nodes or test scaling capabilities of applications across multiple nodes within the cluster.

The company is also offering services to assist users with software migration onto the platform.