AT&T Establishes Cloud Presence

AT&T has launched Synaptic Hosting, a new online managed computing and storage service.Synaptic Hosting will allow companies to host Windows Server or Linux client-server applications and Web apps in AT&T's data centers, rather than in their own data centers. "Anybody that has any type of dynamic need in their environment, this is where they can leverage the scale that AT&T represents," according to Jim Paterson, AT&T's VP of product development for hosting and application services. Paterson estimates the environment can handle 80 percent of common applications today, including the whole LAMP stack, most any Web application, Oracle, and SAP. The new service operates similarly to a managed hosting environment but is licensed as a utility, which should make deployments more scalable and pricing more flexible.InformationWeek