AT&T Lines Up Behind Amazon’s Cloud

In what could be a significant realignment, AT&T and Amazon have announced a new strategic relationship to integrate their respective networking and cloud capabilities.  The two intend to collaborate not just on direct connections to the cloud, which they were already doing of course but will be enhancing further, but also on preconfigured IoT sensors and devices as well as security and threat management.  

AT&T has been tied to rumors of a sale of its own data center and cloud assets several times over the last few years specifically because it hasn’t found a way to tap the market that Amazon’s AWS has been gobbling up.  Those possibilities remain unresolved, but AT&T’s move today indicates that the path forward has clarified somewhat regardless.  If you can’t beat’em, join’em.   AT&T’s mobile reach and global network remain a key piece of the puzzle of course, and the company is said to now be looking for growth via the expansion of its content business.

Meanwhile, AT&T’s brethren Verizon has been tied recently to an imminent sale of its own data center portfolio, specifically the assets associated with Terremark that have formed the backbone of its own effort to conquer the cloud.  Equinix is said to be the likely buyer, which is pretty hard to argue with.  If that happens, Verizon will probably be looking to do something similar to the AT&T/Amazon partnership with one of the large cloud providers out there.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · ILECs, PTTs · Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions