AT&T is leading the march on hybrid cloud deployments. In recent coverage of AT&T at VMworld 2012 on theCube, the company’s service features and tactical advantages were discussed. The takeaway was that the company’s network-based cloud service utilizes both the strength of the built-in network and enterprise-grade cloud services. A recent report features research that solidifies the company’s position in the space, and states:

“Based on Frost & Sullivan’s independent research, AT&T emerges as the most widely used networking provider for connecting private clouds, demonstrating its early strength in this emerging area,” said Lynda Stadtmueller, Program Director, Cloud Computing Services, Frost & Sullivan.

The strategic advantage for customers is obvious. By utilizing VPN networks, the customer environment can easily be bridged for direct access to cloud-based systems. By minimizing provisioning time and creating a unified environment, established customers are tuned to optimal cloud adoption, with all the features and benefits of cloud-based systems, without compromising their own existing environments and systems constructs.

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 position of AT&T as a leader in this space is the product of a world-class strategy and a complete services portfolio. This is reinforced in the report:

Frost & Sullivan surveyed 308 U.S. information technology decision-makers and found that nearly half, 48 percent, use AT&T to connect their private clouds: a full eleven percentage points greater than the number two service provider.

Features such as the scale of the networks, carrier-grade cloud services, network resiliency across multiple global datacenters, and the ability to distribute amongst these broad networks places AT&T in a position like no other. The report reinforces that the value to customers is quite realized in the marketplace.With the benefits of secure, robust, tunable, and resilient solutions, customers are able to gain the ultimate business advantage in reduced time-to-market solutions.

This is rapid cloud realized. A rapid route to adoption equals rapid benefits and it is all available with minimal disruption to the customer environment. With concerns around security and stability satisfied, the focus turns to the environment itself and features such as application management, performance monitoring, and more dedicated to maintaining a robust, healthy, and performing environment. AT&T is in the mission-critical business and has been for a long time. Driving adoption with this game-plan is the full-menu enterprise service portfolio that was once missing in the cloud picture.