AT&T Developing Cloud-Computing Service

You might say AT&T’s head is in the cloud. The company says it’s developing a cloud-computing service with help from Sun and VMWare.

Synaptic Compute as a Service features a Web portal that allows you to order and manage service capacity. It also offers 24-hour network management and monitoring. AT&T touts the service as giving customers plenty of flexibility in determining how much space they need, without a heavy investment in on-site architecture.

VMWare’s vSphere virtualization platform and vCould API help merge AT&T’s cloud with the public Web. The use of Sun’s software is expected to help developers build and deploy value-added services.

Earlier this year, AT&T debuted its first cloud-based offering, a storage system for enterprises.