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AT&T Joins the Cloud

This whole race to cloud computing is getting more interesting by the day. AT&T officially joined the list of major participants this morning. There are parties coming in from nearly every side -- software players like Microsoft, Internet players like Yahoo and Google, hardware/software players like IBM, e-commerce players like Amazon.com, and now a telecom.

AT&T is certainly bringing some infrastructure to the party. The company's announcement said AT&T is investing $1 billion in the effort in 2008 and the infrastructure includes five "super IDCs" (Internet datacenters) in Piscataway, N.J.; San Diego, Calif.; Annapolis, Md.;, Singapore; and Amsterdam. The company has a total of 38 IDCs worldwide.

Officially, AT&T's offering is called AT&T Synaptic HostingSM. The company describes the offering as a "utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for business."

According to a statement from Ron Spears, group president of the AT&T Global Business Services, "The AT&T global network, combined with our powerful computing platform, is driving the convergence of networking and hosting services in ways that are allowing companies to deliver end-user applications whenever and wherever they are needed -- while paying only for the capacity actually used."

An early adopter is the official Web site of the U.S. Olympic Committee. Does that make AT&T the official cloud computing provider for the U.S. Olympic Team?

Posted by Scott Bekker on August 05, 2008


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