The cloud computing movement took another leap forward yesterday, with giants AT&T and IBM separately announcing cloud services.
AT&T announced an international cloud computing service designed to be scalable to allow enterprises to quickly adjust to fluctuations in demand for bandwidth or storage.
The service, which will use technology from Sun Microsystems and VMWare, promises to be scalable enough to support businesses of all sizes, AT&T said.
“[It] 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,” AT&T SVP Roman Pacewicz said.
The AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service suite will launch in the US this quarter, and in Asia and elsewhere by the second quarter of 2010.
Meanwhile, IBM launched its new Smart Analytics Cloud solution for large enterprise clients, offering business intelligence services, systems and software.
The solution is based on IBM's business analytics cloud, which will launch initially with more than a petabyte worth of data, IBM said. Installations will use the Linux-based z/VM virtualization technology.
Gartner estimates that the cloud computing industry will record sales of $3.4 billion this year.