Cloud computing has received a boost as the southern Chinese city of Foshan initiates a new program to expand its own services.

CDC Global Services, a business unit of CDC Corporation, announced today it has entered into an agreement to provide design, implementation and operations services for the Foshan Municipal Cloud Computing Center. This center provides cloud-based computing resources to the public sector users and businesses in the Chinese city of Foshan and the neighboring regions.

To accelerate the adoption of cloud-based services, Foshan is engaging CDC Global Services to design, implement and operate this government-funded Cloud Computing Center. Based on the IaaS layer (Infrastructure as a Service) that the government has invested to build, CDC Global Services has been engaged to design and implement the PaaS layer (Platform as a Service). This PaaS layer will support a set of open standards upon which SaaS-ready products from different suppliers will be selected and implemented to meet the needs of the user community that the center is designed to serve.

CDC Global Services has a professional practice in China for the provision of cloud-based technologies and services to governments and enterprises in the design, setup and operations of both private and public clouds. This professional practice helps its clients in the architecture design and implementation of the IaaS and PaaS layers of the cloud. Based on the business needs of the clients and the communities these clouds are designed to serve, CDC Global Services assists the clients in choosing and developing the SaaS-based applications. It also provides services for the on-going operations and management of these cloud systems to ensure they are meeting their intended purposes.

The financial terms of the deal have not been revealed.