Sprint, like AT&T, Verizon and other telecommunications service providers that are investing heavily in the lucrative data center services business, on July 11 announced an exclusive deal with systems integrator CSC to deliver a new infrastructure as a service offering.
The agreement specifies that Sprint’s network will become the communications backbone to enable secure, high-speed connectivity to CSC’s Trusted Cloud and to bring CSC’s cloud service catalog to Sprint customers. As part of this new service, Sprint also will offer compute, storage, hosting and backup capabilities to midsized and large businesses by late 2012.
CSC’s cloud services include infrastructure and managed hosting services, productivity and collaboration solutions, and application enablement and testing.
The deal with CSC, a large international consulting and services provider, follows the announcement earlier this year of Sprint Complete Collaboration (UCaaS)the telco’s portfolio of cloud-based service options planned for launch later this year. Sprint’s cloud-services approach emphasizes the integration of mobile deployments for any time/any place access from any device.
Sprint Complete Collaboration is built upon a fully integrated Cisco Hosted Collaboration platform and delivered over an all-IP network for real-time UC and collaboration applications.
Sprint’s 3G, 4G and all-IP Global MPLS networks include secure connectivity for enterprises of all sizes that are considering using hosted services.
Sprint also said it is planning the launch of its own software as a service (SaaS) portfolio later this year.