Sprint is jumping into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud market via a joint venture with established cloud vendor CSC, the companies announced Tuesday.
The results, later this year, will include an IaaS offering, along with e-mail, managed hosting and collocation services, which will be hosted by CSC but accessed via Sprint's communications backbone.
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"The promise of the cloud is unfulfilled without a superior network, and Sprint is focused on providing a dependable and continually improving network experience that enterprises can trust not just today but as their mobile data demands and operational complexity evolves," said John Dupree, senior vice president of business sales at Sprint, in a statement. "Our strategic relationship with CSC is another step in our plan to offer a comprehensive set of solutions that leverage Sprint's Tier 1 backbone."
The move expands Sprint's previously announced unified communications cloud-based offerings, for which the company teamed with Cisco to offer desktop video and collaboration tools.
Sprint hinted at additional announcements in the coming months for software as a service-based (SaaS) communications, collaboration and security offerings.
Today's announcement marks yet another big name tech company jumping into the increasingly crowded IaaS market. In the past few months both Microsoft and Google have expanded their offerings to include an IaaS cloud, seemingly in hopes to displace the market-leading position of Amazon Web Services.
Communications companies have been moving aggressively to offer cloud services as well. Verizon bought Terremark and CloudSwitch last year, while competing telecommunication company CenturyLink bought Savvis.
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On the wireless side, AT&T has been focusing on not only an IaaS offering, but also a platform as a service (PaaS) strategy that allows users to create customized applications running on the AT&T network.
Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.
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