AT-T and Digital Realty have joined forces in an expanded deal that will broaden AT-T's colocation footprint, enabling it to expand into more markets beyond the current 38 locations in 16 countries.

The deal, which spans Digital Realty's global portfolio of data centers, enables AT-T to incorporate Digital Realty colocation capacity directly into its solutions, enhancing its existing network and managed services offerings.

The two companies will also extend AT-T's NetBond cloud connectivity service to key Digital Realty data centers, extending its reach to existing and new cloud service providers.

The companies say during 2016 customers will be able to connect to the growing suite of AT-T NetBond cloud service providers from its locations iwthin a Digital Realty data center, bringing more options for cloud connectivity.

René Dufrene, AT-T Mobile and Business Solutions associate vice president, says the speed of business growth is outpacing IT and driving an ‘insatiable' appetite for data center capacity, bandwidth and cloud connectivity.

“This alliance with Digital Realty enables us to extend our product offerings enabled by Digital Realty's data center footprint and provide highly secure, high-performing and reliable connectivity to business workloads wherever they reside,” Dufrene says.

AT-T has 13 NetBond members, including IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS, HP, VMware, Cisco and Equinix.

Bill Bradley, Digital Realty senior vice president of partners and alliances, says the deal highlights the opportunity for both companies to help end-users deploy their IT workloads in data centers via the colocation program and to provide greater performance, security and control, via AT-T NetBond.