Hello, AT&T? Do You Even Know What Cloud Computing Is?

THIS POST HAS BEEN CORRECTED (See comments for details.)
Blaise Zerega finds it all confusing. AT&T today announced a cloud computing initiative called Synaptic Hosting. But its unclear what's new from Ma Bell, and it raises the question of whether AT&T even knows what cloud computing is. In fairness, though, the new technology means different things to different people. Fortunately, the brilliant Irving Wladawsky Berger has been wrestling with its meanings.

A couple of weeks ago, Berger argued that these new cloud services will be distinct for being "simpler, safer, and smarter." And then, yesterday, Berger elaborated on the apparent confusion while striving to offer five clear principles.

1. Well designed consumer and business services -- Such as Google Maps.

2. The evolution of the Internet -- Cloud computing should be viewed as the Web's next technological advancement.

3. Massive scalability -- Cloud computing should support billions of people, connect them to their devices as well as devices to devices.

4. Well engineered cloud delivery centers -- Many data centers are still in a "pre-industrialization" stage and need to be redesigned.

5. Relevance of cloud computing to most companies -- Berger writes that because "None of us can predict which way it will go, let
alone how quickly things will happen. But that isn't a reason to sit
on the sidelines and wait."

Which brings us back to AT&T.... Its new service is part of a $1 billion investment for 2008, and will use technology acquired from
USinternetworking (USi) to create five "super" internet data centers among its existing network of 38 existing internet data centers in United States, Europe and Asia. Presumably, these new data centers will conform to Berger's 4th principle.

But parsing through the rest of the service offerings feels a bit like a mish-mash of existing hosted services with new on-demand platforms. GigaOm has more analysis on this, pretty much along similar lines. Stacey Higgenbotham raises the question that perhaps the mixed signals in AT&T's announcement were meant to assuage fears from large, enterprise customers. I'd wonder though, if the poor messaging also doesn't reflect some internal confusion on the part of AT&T.

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