Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Rackspace Brings Its Openstack Product Lineup To Public Cloud

Rackspace, in a bid to bring OpenStack cloud services to a wider audience, moved its OpenStack products out of private beta and into general availability. What this means is that customers now have the ability to build public clouds using Rackspace's infrastructure.

Included in the move are Rackspace's Cloud Databases and Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, as well as its updated Control Panel.

"This is the culmination of a couple of years' work to get it ready for prime time, and get ready for large-scale or small-scale public or private clouds," John Engates, Rackspace CTO, told CRN. "This is the first time customers can take advantage of a true OpenStack cloud to deploy a private or public cloud."

Fujitsu Spearheading Smartphone Chip Development Project

Fujitsu, Fujitsu Semiconductor, NTT DoCoMo and NEC are teaming up on a joint venture to build smartphone chips in an effort to take a bite out of Qualcomm and Texas Instruments' market share.

The joint venture, called Access Network Technology Limited, is set to begin operations this month. It will blend a range of communications technologies and result in "highly competitive" mobile products, the companies said in a statement.

"The technologies individually held by the companies, as well as the results of their joint development work, offer a huge competitive advantage in the smartphone market, which is expected to experience an even greater global expansion,’ read the companies’ joint statement.

HP Wins Latest Itanium Court Decision Against Oracle

A California Superior Court judge ruled that Oracle is contractually committed to develop software for Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-based servers. Oracle immediately vowed to appeal the decision, and to continue its quest to prove that HP misled its partners and customers. The decision by Judge James Kleinberg of the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara, ensures that the acrimonious dispute between the former close partners will not only continue, but could potentially intensify.

Box Scores $125 Million Round Of Venture Capital Funding

Cloud storage provider Box landed $125 million in venture capital funding and said it plans to use the money to further its expansion into the enterprise storage market.

’The investment will fund continued support of Box’s growing enterprise customer base -- building tools that will make Box more appealing to large enterprises, international growth and expansion and [investing] aggressively in talent,’ Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, general manager of enterprise at Box, wrote in an email to CRN.

AT&T Ponies Up $650 Million To Acquire NextWave Wireless

AT&T is paying $650 million to acquire wireless spectrum license specialist NextWave Wireless, a move that could help AT&T open up more wireless spectrum for mobile data usage.

NextWave manages and maintains wireless spectrum licenses in the 2.3GHz Wireless Communication Services (WCS) and Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) bands.

AT&T has been lobbying regulators to allow the use of the WCS spectrum for mobile Internet service, which AT&T described as "much-needed new spectrum capacity."