AT&T announced its new cloud computing service on August 12, dubbed “AT&T Synaptic Hosting.” With the new offering, the telecommunications company joins Amazon, Google and IBM as a service provider in the nascent application hosting market.
The service is aimed at providing companies with greater flexibility, improved performance and cost savings by eliminating the need to maintain their own data centers, according to AT&T. It is part of the company’s US$1 billion planned global network investment for 2008 and leverages technology acquired from AT&T’s acquisition of US internetworking (USi).
“‘Synaptic Hosting’ is AT&T’s brand around their VMware-based managed hosting platform and to a large extent a repackaging and rebranding of the virtualization capabilities they acquired when they bought USi,” Daryl Plummer, an analyst at Gartner (NYSE: IT), told the E-Commerce Times.
