Amazon has reported a 22 percent rise in sales for its most recent financial quarter but saw the gloss taken off its results by posting a net loss its full year.

Amazon posted sales of $21.27bn for its quarter ending 31 December 2012, up from $17.43 in the year-ago quarter. Profits however slumped from $177m in Q411 to $97m in its latest quarter.

Over the full year, Amazon saw its sales hit $61.09bn, up 28 percent on 2011.

Despite the jump in sales, Amazon posted a $39m loss for the year, compared to profits of $631m in 2011.

“We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” said Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos.

“After five years, e-books is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast – up approximately 70 percent last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just five percent.”

The company said that its Kindle product line-up was by far its best-selling. The Kindle Fire HD was its best-selling product, followed by the Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle tablets.

Though retail is still Amazon’s top business, the company worked to build out its Web Services operation in 2012. The enterprise cloud computing platform kicked off its first ever user conference last year.

The AWS lineup also expanded its service line to include a data warehousing offering and a high-memory database platform.

HP is touting the benefits of a converged datacentre infrastructure to its customers, claiming that this architecture delivers IT that is not only more flexible and future-proof, but can cut costs by serving as a better foundation for implementing virtualisation and cloud computing strategies.

Converged infrastructure is one of those nebulous IT industry terms that can mean different things to different people at different times. For HP, its definition revolves around corralling servers, storage and networking into a general-purpose resource pool capable of being turned to whatever a customer’s current compute requirements might be.

If you think that sounds a lot like cloud computing, that’s because converged infrastructure is essentially the hardware foundation upon which a private cloud can be implemented, although it can also be used for other applications.

It stands in contrast to more traditional ways of building out IT infrastructure, where applications tended to be deployed in silos of dedicated infrastructure, running on a dedicated server cluster hooked up to dedicated storage.

In fact, converged infrastructure is a concept HP claims to have pioneered on a smaller scale with its BladeSystem blade servers several years back, which mix server, storage and networking inside a single enclosure.

“BladeSystem was really the first implementation of converged infrastructure, and everything we’ve been doing since then has been leading towards this,” said Bob McEwan, chief technologist for HP Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking in the UK.

Among the claimed benefits of converged infrastructure are that IT departments are able to spend less time on just maintaining the infrastructure, according to HP, and can consequently focus more on technology efforts that will drive the business forwards.

“Converged infrastructure provides you with the engine to move from just keeping the lights on to being able to drive innovation,” said David Chalmers, HP’s Enterprise Group chief technologist, for EMEA.

While HP would obviously like customers to invest in its own server, storage, and network kit, the firm contends that it, or rather its system integrator partners, will be prepared to help customers adopt a converged infrastructure strategy by incorporating what they already have, rather than starting again with a clean sheet.

“Other vendors will tell you what you have to do is buy everything from them. It smells like a lock-in, and it is. Converged infrastructure for us is about partnering, not just about being the supplier,” said Chalmers.

However, other enterprise vendors, notably Dell, have been telling much the same story. It seems that suppliers have cottoned on to the fact that few customers are prepared to do a rip-and-replace of much of their infrastructure, regardless of the advantages promised, and so they are bending over backwards to incorporate legacy kit into any new build-out that customers are prepared to purchase.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a memory-intensive instance of its EC2 cloud service designed to let users clusters tailored for applications such as SAP’s HANA in-memory analytics platform.

AWS’s High Memory Cluster will target firms looking to use cloud-based services for memory-intensive applications such as heavy duty number crunching. AWS said it expected to generate interest among firms at the vanguard of big data projects.

“Memory-intensive workloads such as real-time applications used by healthcare providers, social networking companies and advertising technology providers require large amounts of memory to maintain high-performance,” said Peter DeSantis, vice president of compute services, at AWS.

“We designed the High Memory Cluster instances specifically for these workloads.”

ASW High Memory Cluster instances are based on two Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors which provide 88 EC2 Compute Units of compute capacity, two 120GB solid state drives of instance storage, high bandwidth networking, and 244 GiB (262GB) of RAM.

AWS claimed it would provide customers with the most cost-effective method of buying instances with large memory allocations.

The High Memory Clusters are initially only available to customers using AWS’s US East Region, via its on-demand, spot market or reservation system. AWS expects to make the service available in other regions in the coming months.

High Memory Clusters are available for customers want both Linux and Windows-based instances, via the AWS Management Console, command line interfaces and third-party libraries.

AWS has been expanding the capabilities of its cloud services of late, increasingly focussing on delivering high-end offerings. Late last year it announced it would launch its Redshift platform, offering data warehousing capabilities in the cloud.

But while AWS is hoping to lure firms into using its infrastructure for business-critical systems, it has also been left red-faced by services outages.

A problem with its Elastic Load Balancing resulted in major web firms, including Netflix, being left without service just before Christmas.