NEW YORK, USA: US network operator AT&T announced plans to develop and release the AT&T Synaptic compute-as-a-service, a cloud based service to give all customers on-demand access to scalable computing capacity.

The company said that the service, scheduled to be available from AT&T's US data centres inthe fourth quarter of 2009, will not have any associated up-front fees, long term obligations or terminations fees.

Soon clouds will speak to each other

Provisioning and configuration of resources will be via a web portaland multiple storage options will be available, including the ability to configure the amount of on-board storage for each virtual instance.

Pricing details for the service were not disclosed. AT&T said that it is expecting to deploy the service to international data centres 'in time', to meet the demands of international customers.