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AT&T confident of demand for new managed hosting platform

Tony Chan | November 30, 2008 | 0 Comments

Increased flexibility and efficiency, as well as disaster recovery requirements will drive the adoption of its newly launched Synaptic Hosting platform in Singapore, says AT&T.

As part of a US$1 billion investment commitment for 2008 to its global network infrastructure, AT&T recently upgraded its Singapore data centre to a so-called, Super IDC (Internet data centre), which will serve as the operator’s regional gateway to its new Synaptic Hosting platform.

Collis Loh, AT&T’s Singapore country manager, said “Enhancement that we have made is not just for floor space, but including our next generation utility computing services.”

The Synaptic Hosting platform will enhance the operators’ existing service portfolio of managed services with new applications management capabilities, according to Loh. With the new platform, enterprises will be able to basically rent computing and storage capacity from the operator, instead of investing in their own hardware and facilities, he said.

While he declined to reveal any potential savings for customers, citing differences between customer requirements, Loh says that by moving to the utility computing model of Synaptic Hosting will offer similar performance and operational benefits as a virtualised computing model.

Without virtualisation, eighty enterprise servers might only be running at 20% utilisation, while with a utility computing platform, there might be 20 servers but running at 80% utilisation, he said.

So far, the response from customers has been positive although no customers have signed up yet, he said.

“We’ve seen awareness going up, with customers coming back to us with lots of questions now looking for more detail on this,” he said. “If we can give them greater flexibility, performance and cost savings on top of that, it is an attractive proposition for them.”

Loh added that the new platform is ideal for enterprises looking to scale up (or down) their resources to match changing business environments – both externally for online business platforms as well as for internal applications – as well as to implement business continuity solutions.

“It is certainly interesting time at the moment, but the timing of this launch is also what I considered interesting,” he said.