AT&T today announced that it has been identified in the leaders quadrant in Gartner Inc.'s most recent report on North American Web hosting providers.(1)

According to Gartner, leaders are vendors who are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market. Gartner noted, "The market, particularly the high-end dedicated hosting niche, is changing from dedicating equipment to each customer and charging by the piece of equipment to offering 'virtualized' or 'utility computing' services that are priced based on usage ... The hosting market has moved from stagnation to innovation, thanks to the transition to utility computing."

"We are thrilled to be recognized by Gartner in the leader quadrant in the hosting business -- a strategic growth area for us," said Kathleen Flaherty, AT&T chief marketing officer. "We continue to invest in this business and in our networking infrastructure to deliver the performance, reliability and security required by businesses and government agencies for their critical hosted applications-especially in a shared, utility model."

Over the last few years, AT&T has consistently invested and driven innovation into its suite of enterprise hosting services. This year alone, AT&T has:
<li>Introduced a multi ISP capability to ensure the highest levels of redundancy, flexibility and security for Internet access;
<li>Expanded its global footprint of Internet Data Centers to 25 facilities on four continents;
<li>Begun working with leading solution providers, such as Inkra Networks and Sun Microsystems, Inc., to offer virtualized and "pay-as-you-go" services that allow clients to easily migrate applications to a fully redundant architecture;
<li>Extended its global network management and monitoring capabilities to customer premises applications;
<li>Launched AT&T E-mail Archiving, a managed service designed to help businesses, State and U.S. government agencies comply with increasingly challenging data retention regulations, while coping with the exponential growth in storage requirements for e-mail communication;
<li>Introduced Disk Backup and Restore capabilities to provide high-performance data protection and reduced back-up and restore times, while extending storage capabilities to the customer's premise, and
<li>Introduced its first Utility Computing Service to offer flexible pricing options combined with automated provisioning, patch and configuration management of managed servers. Together, these options enable customers to correlate the availability of IT services with their business needs as they define them.

Customers of AT&T Enterprise Hosting Services include AssetPoint, United States Golf Association, and Wipro Technologies. More information on AT&T hosting services is available at: http://www.att.com/business.

A full copy of the Gartner report outlining AT&T's position in the Web hosting quadrant can be found at http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/gc...sue6/index.html

(1) Source: Gartner, "Magic Quadrant for North American Web Hosting,
2004", T. Chamberlin, L. Leong, October 2004.

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2004 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service epicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About AT&T
For more than 125 years, AT&T (NYSE "T") has been known for unparalleled quality and reliability in communications. Backed by the research and development capabilities of AT&T Labs, the company is a global leader in local, long distance, Internet and transaction-based voice and data services.

AT&T 'Safe Harbor'
The foregoing contains "forward-looking statements" which are based on management's beliefs as well as on a number of assumptions concerning future events made by and information currently available to management. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of performance and are subject to a number of uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside AT&T's control, that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements or a more detailed description of the factors that could cause such a difference, please see AT&T's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. AT&T disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Source AT&T Web Site: http://www.att.com http://www.att.com/business