AT&T joins global rivals in the ‘cloud’

Supporting the Synaptic business will be five “super Internet data centers,” partially acquired from US Internetworking and partially built from scratch as part of AT&T’s announced $1 billion global network investment in 2008. The super IDCs will be located in Piscataway, N.J.; San Diego; Annapolis, Md.; Singapore and Amsterdam and will act as regional gateways to the AT&T network cloud, the company said.

AT&T first talked with Telephony about its cloud computing plans back in June (see: Telcos Living in the Cloud). At the time, AT&T stressed that its cloud initiatives would focus on the enterprise rather than consumers like Web players. “Not to be disparaging, but I don't know anybody in that space known for delivering enterprise, mission-critical-type services,” said Steve Caniano, vice president of hosting and application services for AT&T.

Caniano’s statement of direction comes to fruition with the Synaptic announcement. In an interview today, AT&T’s Paterson said Synaptic would be based on a set of six architectural building blocks that enterprises could mix and match to gain the computing power they require. For instance, a baseline instance of a single CPU server with 2 gigabytes of memory would be the starting point, and users could buy as much capacity as they need for as long as they need it. That utility style pricing is a good fit for today’s economy, where businesses can’t afford to overbuy or overbuild their data centers ahead of the needs of the business, Paterson said.

On the higher end of the equation would be a business such as the US Olympic Committee Web site, which will be hosted by the new service. The TeamUSA.org site started from scratch from a traffic perspective and will expand to meet massive visitor requirements this summer. In the same way, a retailer could buy Synaptic computing capabilities for the holiday season, or a game publisher could buy capacity before the launch of a new title.

With AT&T’s launch and Verizon’s announced debut slated for the first quarter of next year, service providers are beginning to draw attention away from much-touted cloud computing offerings from Google, Amazon and others. The truth is, said Paterson, “Cloud computing means a lot of different things to different people. The only thing that everyone can agree on is that no one can define the one, single thing that it means.”