AT&T today launched a utility or cloud computing service combining its network and hosting businesses to compete with similar offerings from global carrier competitors Verizon and BT and upstart Web players like Google and Amazon.com.

Web companies like Google -- as well as IT vendors like HP-EDS and Sun – have garnered most of the early attention for their cloud computing efforts. But global service providers like AT&T are arguably much better positioned to serve the enterprise in particular with utility computing services, combining its existing IP networks and MPLS services and hardware and software hosting capabilities.

What’s new is that rather than deploy such network and computing resources to enterprises on a one-off or dedicated basis, AT&T will offer those converged services on a utility basis – with pre-packaged service tiers, utility-style pricing and all-encompassing service level agreements (SLAs), said Jim Paterson, vice president of product development of AT&T’s Hosting and Application Services.

Paterson said that today AT&T’s IP network reaches 97% of the world’s economies, and its hosting business works with 100% of the Fortune 1000. The company simply listened to those enterprise customers, he said, and found “what they’re really asking us for is to take the goodness associated with our global IP network and extend it and converge it with our hosting offer.”

The combination of those two capabilities is AT&T Synaptic Hosting, a new service that combines utility computing, security and storage capabilities with managed networking. At the start, the links between the telecom and computing sides of the house will be somewhat limited, but they will only increase over time such that quality of service (QOS) capabilities for customers will extend across the whole platform, from the network to the host server infrastructure to the applications running on those machines, Paterson said.