New AT&T offering aims to help business customers create their own cloud-based services

AT&T yesterday announced a new cloud-based service aimed at making it easier for end user organizations to create their own cloud-based applications.

“The applications we would envision are web-enabling and mobile-enabling back office, run-the-business applications,” said Steve Caniano, vice president of hosting and cloud services for AT&T Business Solutions. Front office applications might include sales force tracking, while back office applications might include expense management and inventory management, Caniano said.

AT&T calls the new offering Platform as a Service (PaaS)—and customers will pay for it based on a monthly per-user basis.

Included in the offering are pre-packaged templates that customers can tailor to meet their needs. “Those templates are deployed as a starting point,” explained Caniano. “Through point-and-click, [customers] can take one or several [templates] and customize them to meet their business needs.”

Once an application is developed, it will be available through AT&T’s cloud platform. “It sits on top of our computing-as-a-service offering,” said Caniano. “The environment is a development environment and a runtime environment.”

PaaS supports mobile connectivity
AT&T already has beta tested the PaaS with several customers. From that experience the carrier found customers using the platform to support both internal and customer-facing applications.

And although the offering is not intended to support the transformation of large-scale premises-based applications, Caniano said it has an import capability and AT&T has seen customers use it to move spreadsheet-based applications to the cloud. For example, he said, some companies may maintain product and inventory data on spreadsheets, but maintaining those spreadsheets is challenging.

PaaS, Caniano said is well suited for converting that kind of data into a more on-line web-based—and easier to maintain--application.

An important capability of the new offering is the ability to support mobile connectivity to customer-developed cloud-based applications. Application programming interfaces supporting location-based capabilities and short message service are included in the offering.

By using these interfaces, Caniano said, “we can envision things like creating a collection tool for customer surveys.” The collection tool would enable responses from survey participants at a shopping mall to be communicated to a central database using a mobile application. In addition, the tool would automatically send a text message to the respondent saying “Thank you and here’s a coupon for the mall.”