AT&T today announced AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service, its latest innovative global cloud-based service, designed to give companies of all sizes simple on-demand access to scalable computing capacity.

Using technology from VMware and Sun Microsystems, AT&T's Synaptic Compute as a Service provides companies with a self-service approach for using IT solutions that are reliably delivered by AT&T over its highly-secure world-class network cloud.

Customers can use the service to quickly address demands for variable computing processing power and expand capacity to scale with their business requirements. In turn, AT&T delivers computing processing capacity that can scale to meet a business's immediate demand, along with management of the network, server, hardware and storage.

"As companies increasingly move to cloud-based environments, AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service provides a much-needed choice for IT executives who worry about over-building or under-investing in the capacity needed to handle their users' traffic demands," said Roman Pacewicz, senior vice president of Strategy and Application Services, AT&T Business Solutions.

"AT&T is enabling customers to extend their internal IT environments to the cloud by using their unique strengths in global network capabilities to offer cloud services that are compatible with customers' private VMware environments," said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware. "We are excited to contribute our technology to enable this and to work with AT&T in our VMware vCloud(TM) initiative that is focused on integrating and connecting private and public clouds, using the VMware vSphere(TM) virtualization platform and the VMware vCloud API."

AT&T is also working closely with Sun to use the Sun Cloud Open Cloud Platform, Sun Cloud APIs, cloud reference architecture and design expertise to create an environment to make it easy for developers to build and deploy value-added services.

"Sun is committed to helping our customers and partners deliver public and private clouds that are cost effective, open and interoperable," said Dave Douglas, senior vice president, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems. "AT&T's network and operational excellence coupled with Sun's Open Cloud Platform and Sun Cloud APIs delivers a revolutionary cloud offering. We're excited to be working with AT&T to bring an enterprise-class, highly scalable offering that delivers choice and flexibility to market."

AT&T will introduce the service in the fourth quarter of 2009. The service will be deployed in the U.S. and will be accessible by customers connecting to the Web anywhere. In time, AT&T plans to add the service to select global IDCs to meet customer demand internationally.

Other service features:

• A Web portal to order, provision and manage server capacity, or to program the APIs.
• The convenience to pay only for the capacity used and receive a monthly bill that can, if desired, be paid with a credit card.
• Multiple storage options including disk capacity for each virtual server's operating system and space to share files between virtual servers, as well as the ability to connect to AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service.
• Round-the-clock monitoring of the Synaptic Compute as a Service platform by AT&T support teams.
• A service level agreement that covers availability of the platform that runs the customer's virtual servers.
• No upfront fees, no long-term obligations and no termination fees.
  

AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service is the latest addition to the AT&T family of Synaptic Services to be delivered in little more than a year. AT&T's Synaptic portfolio is part of its umbrella strategy to drive innovation across enterprise networking and computing environments through hybrid public and private cloud platforms. The AT&T network is the lynchpin for integrating these technologies, and delivering enterprise class network-based security and application management capabilities. In addition, AT&T believes its "infrastructure as a service" platform over time will accelerate the deployment of applications generated by developers working within the AT&T network cloud.

By unifying -- also known as "federating" -- with the AT&T service, customers will be able to seamlessly manage all their IT resources across the enterprise and develop applications all from one location and move application workloads where and when they are needed. Customers will be able to handle their business needs all in the same way whether they will be running internally in their own datacenter or in AT&T's cloud.

With AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service, customers can program their application to routinely expand capacity during a block of days each month to handle their firm's book closing. Transportation firms can increase computing power daily for processing driver schedules, route changes and other logistics. Companies can program the service to respond to spikes in Web traffic from holiday sales or events, sports programs, short-term campaigns, emergencies and more. Also, IT architects can use the service to build environments for safely testing new applications, or installing system upgrades without impacting the entire enterprise.

For more information on AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service go to http://www.synaptic.att.com.