In a move evidently aimed at grabbing a bigger portion of the $14 billion market for cloud services, computer services provider IBM and leading US wireless carrier AT&T have joined forces to offer a service, which will give the customers the accessibility to IBM's back-end infrastructure over AT&T's secure private lines.

In a combined statement about the new service, IBM and AT&T said that while data-storage facilities and services will be provided by the former company, the latter will offer the worldwide network which will be used by customers to retrieve the data.

With `cloud services' referring to the storage of information and software in off-site data centers, the IBM-AT&T venture - in which, as per the terms of the deal, the two companies will share revenue among themselves - will essentially attract an increasing number of customers to the cloud.

Noting that IBM will be the first company to boast direct accessibility to the technology which controls AT&T's network for business users, Dennis Quan - VP for SmartCloud Infrastructure at IBM - said that the sharing of network by IBM and AT&T underscores "an integrated, end-to-end solution that provides access to cloud computing resources, and a secure pipe over which to access them."

Further adding that the deal with AT&T implies "a lot simpler" consumption of cloud for users, Quan said that the new service will "unleash a lot of pent up demand for cloud computing."