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Steve Caniano, VP of hosting and cloud solutions, AT&T |
The company now has 38 IDCs spanning five continents, collectively providing 2.6 million sq ft of hosting and supporting over 400,000 devices. The company plans to invest up to $1 billion in hosting and cloud services to enable multinational customers to benefit from its growing network and global footprint.
“Our primary proposition is integration of networks and applications. By being a global carrier we believe this is a differentiation of other services in the market in its own right,” said Steve Caniano, vice president of hosting and cloud solutions at AT&T. “There are a lot of different value propositions offered by standalone providers but they do not have a network. The bigger operators that do offer both services tend to be country centric and do not span on a global basis. We do not compete with Orange or BT in the US, for example, and our customers tend to need a global consistent solution which is lacking from our competitors.”
The company has been growing its international business for a number of years and has recently invested in numerous markets, including Singapore, Amsterdam and the US. In terms of new markets, AT&T invested in Bangalore and Toronto. Caniano said: “We have good coverage as far as the footprint but demand is something we need to continue to address.”
AT&T’s global and domestic rival Verizon has also opened a data centre in Hong Kong, as the company prepares for the launch of cloud computing services in Canberra in 2011.
Described as a gateway to China and India for multinational corporations, the Hong Kong hub will connect directly to Verizon’s global IP network. It will be used as a temporary solution until customers migrate to the Canberra facility when it opens.
Judy Reed Smith, CEO at Atlantic-ACM said: “The important cities are the largest business and population centres on each continent, if the company’s customer targets are multinational corporations and service goals are to offer the full range of co-location to cloud. With different business models, companies may target a city with the least7 expensive power or the least chance of weather damage.”
