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 at 11:58 AM