The future of the enterprise focuses on the implementation of hybrid clouds, where CIOs have focused their attention.  With significant investment in their existing infrastructure, the notion of hybrid clouds is a perfect solution to such goals as geographic expansion, mobility, and capacity.  In fact, cloud and mobility marry quite nicely as solutions.   Additionally, the time to market equation is a big factor for cloud adoption.  Time to market is critical for customer businesses, and cloud services offers newfound ability to turn on a dime, reduce cycles to weeks where they once took months.

The SiliconAngle team has been discussing the Data Infrastructure and seeing validation of this new mission throughout VMworld 2012.  Caniano agrees that data is at the center of the value proposition.  As data and storage continue to grow astronomically, it is important to note that the focus has to maintain on solutions and storage is just a means to an end.  One example Caniano shares is the ability in the healthcare space to create a mobilized access to medical imaging platforms, traditionally a very data-intensive application once bound to localized environments.  By taking that raw infrastructure into the cloud and developing this solution, the capacity is converted into a robust solution set.Caniano states that the cloud datacenter is centered on significant customer demands that look at multitenant and private clouds alike.  AT&T is investing in a strategy of building multitenant architecture across many sites.  This strategy gives the customer flexibility options such as tuning for latency, the ability to move workloads, provide scale, and ultimately a nimbleness that was not possible before.

AT&T has a wide variety of existing client base and serves enterprise of all sizes.  The demand for network and cloud services is strong against all the segments, though they have always seen the strongest demand in the mid-market.  The solutions deliver answers to the requirements that dog those in this space,  like IT staffing, capital expenditure, and resources.  Down-market opportunities exist in more finished solutions that can be characterized as turnkey, prefab, or self-serve solutions.  The takeaway is that they operate within a wide business focus.

The company is focused on spending time on the union between network and cloud services.  Offering the cloud as a feature of the company’s networks means unleashing the potential of turning on computing as a service on demand.  Mobile is seen as a key business drive to the cloud, along with the abilities of speed and agility that differentiate businesses in time to market.  Additional factors include the advantages of moving away from a capital expenditure model, and putting costs in check, even on the operating expenditure side.

More on AT&T’s Enterprise Cloud Services can be found at http://www.business.att.com/enterprise/Portfolio/cloud/