AT&T's Donovan: We'll migrate 80% of our apps into the cloud by end of 2016

AT&T (NYSE: T) continues to make progress with transforming more of its network to software, telling attendees at this week's Open Networking Summit (ONS) that it will migrate 80 percent of its applications into a private cloud by the end of the year.

John Donovan, AT&T

Donovan (Source: AT&T)

John Donovan, chief strategy officer and president of technology and operations for AT&T, said that the service provider moves one of its own internal IT applications into the cloud each day.

These migrations are part of a broader initiative it is taking to virtualize 75 percent of its network by 2020.

In 2015, AT&T moved a mainframe application for inventory management that was created in the early 1970s, for example.

Donovan told The Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal that putting mainframe inventory applications into the cloud enables AT&T to increase flexibility and exiting maintenance agreements. "You do things first with the biggest maintenance agreements, with the oldest stuff where you're out of capacity," Donovan said.

The service provider also unveiled its new Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) project. ECOMP will enable AT&T to automate service delivery, service assurance, performance management, fault management and SDN tasks. 

Donovan said it "is designed to work with OpenStack but is extensible to other cloud and compute environments."

Besides providing benefits to its internal IT operations, AT&T's software-driven movement is enabling new services for its business customers. By using an SDN construct, AT&T's Network on Demand capability is being deployed as part of its User Defined Network Cloud (UDNC) strategy launched in February 2014. As of the end of  2015, AT&T said its Ethernet on demand service has attracted 275 customers.

For more:
- WSJ CIO Journal has this blog post

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