HP, Intel and Yahoo have joined forces to develop technology that they hope will help them tap into anticipated business demand for cloud computing services.

The Cloud Computing Test Beds, encompassing six research and development centres, will allow prospective customers from corporate, government and education sectors to test servers, storage, networks and management software that can be used to support a large-scale cloud computing infrastructure.

Though still in the early stages of its development, cloud computing, whereby powerful IT capabilities are delivered as a service over the internet, has been tipped to revolutionise the way organisations access compute resources over the next five to 10 years.

Rivals IBM and Google announced a similar pact last year. The Academic Cluster Computing Initiative (ACCI) was designed to help US computer science students and researchers to explore cloud computing’s potential by providing servers and open source software in datacentres across the country.