AT&T Named a Leader in Gartner 2013 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting for Seventh Consecutive Year

AT&T has been ranked tops by Gartner in its latest review of the managed hosting sector. This is the seventh consecutive year in which the telecom giant has been named a "leader" by Gartner in the managed services space, and the company was included in the “2013 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting, North America 1” report.

The Gartner report examines 15 vendors and evaluates the enterprise-class managed hosting market specifically, regardless of the type of underlying infrastructure. The study looks at a number of criteria, including the ability to execute on service offerings and service excellence; companies' overall business viability and track record and participants' overall vision for the future needs of their customers.

The managed hosting market leaders were chosen based on their ability to have staying power in the sector, to be relied on for enterprise-class needs and to frequently show innovation through their existing products. Gartner's leaders were also selected for their proven technical competence along with the ability to deliver services to a wide range of customers. They were also chosen based on their ability to address multiple use cases using stand-alone or integrated solutions.

For the purposes of the report, managed hosting services are defines as helping businesses simplify the management of their IT infrastructure. Gartner describes managed hosting agreements as those in which a provider hosts an enterprise's data and applications within their data center facilities as well as managing the customer's computing, storage capacity and network bandwidth. Services are often combined with cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as well.

AT&T's managed hosting offerings manage customers' infrastructure from the hardware level, including servers and racks, to the database and operating system level. The company has a global infrastructure made up of 38 Internet data centers.