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Cloud Reportby Jeffrey Schwartz, Executive Editor
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AT&T Adds PaaS to Its Cloud Portfolio
AT&T has extended its cloud portfolio with a Platform as as Service offering (PaaS) aimed at letting business users, enterprise developers and ISVs build, test and run their apps in the telco's hosted environment.
Launched this week, AT&T Platform as a Service will allow application developers and tech-savvy business people to build and deploy apps using either AT&T-provided tooling or Eclipse-based development tools. Those using AT&T's Web-based tools and templates don't require coding expertise, according to AT&T.
The tools consist of templates that allow either customer development or the use of 50 pre-built apps. The tools also allow developers to configure their apps for mobile devices and add social networking features. The service is built on LongJump's platform. LongJump's PaaS is a Java-based platform that provides the templates enabling non-technical users to build line-of-business apps, or developers using Eclipse-based tools to build custom applications.
AT&T's entrée suggests the PaaS market is poised to mature, according to Forrester analyst Stefan Ried. "AT&T has the potential to get into a real volume business with this offering bridging the gap between consumer style services and corporate usage of PaaS -- similar to what Google managed around email and the rest of Google's applications," Ried wrote in a blog post.
Will telecom giants such as AT&T and Verizon ultimately seize a big piece of the PaaS pie? While they have the advantage of their robust network infrastructures, players such as Google, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware have aggressive plans with their own PaaS offerings. But the telcos promise to make it an even more heavily contested battle in 2012.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 17, 2011