AT&T (NYSE: T) sees that the cloud has the potential to serve both its own needs and those of its enterprise customers.
The telco has set an ambitious cloud strategy where it has been placing its own internal and external applications into a cloud environment.
"I think right now as an IT shop, we're probably the most aggressive cloud company in the world," said John Donovan, senior executive vice president, AT&T Technology and Network Operations, during the Citi Internet Media & Telecommunications Conference on Monday. "Our target is to have over 90 percent of our apps in the cloud."
Donovan added that in 2013, AT&T put nearly 20 percent of their internal apps into the cloud. Over the next three to five years, they will be an entirely cloud-based enterprise.
AT&T is attacking the cloud services market from three angles: putting all new applications in the cloud; extending VPN services into the cloud; and cloud-enabling cloud services that enterprise customers use from Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and other providers.
With its NetBond capability, AT&T can work with their enterprise customer's cloud service. AT&T said that NetBond works by bonding "networking and computing resources together and automates functions that are often performed manually."
"We put a lot of effort into cloud enabling other clouds via our NetBond product," Donovan said. "This says if you have AT&T's VPN network and you want to go with Microsoft as your cloud provider, our VPN bonds into their cloud so you still get compute, storage and network."
A customer could extend its MPLS private network directly into a cloud provided by IBM or another provider with similar performance and security capabilities of a private cloud offering.
Over the past year, the telco has established relationships with a number of cloud providers including CSC, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT).
Donovan said that these cloud agreements could potentially help their enterprise customers reduce service costs.
"We announced deals with IBM, Microsoft and CSC and that's the heart of those where they go up to the bare metal with the network because the average network customer who uses Amazon is paying for a network twice," he said. "They buy one from somebody like us and then when they buy the services from Amazon the network gets charged with compute and storage so there's an economic reason as well as a security reason to be able to do that."
An agreement announced last year enabled CSC to deliver its BizCloud and other cloud services via AT&T's cloud infrastructure and networks. In addition, CSC can migrate applications to enable AT&T's customers to get access to a cloud environment.
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