NEW YORK, June 3 (Reuters) - Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) on Thursday unveiled a pay-as-you go hosting service for corporate customers looking to save money by buying only as much computing capacity as they need at any given time.
Verizon is the latest U.S. telecom to jump on the bandwagon of so-called "cloud computing" services after AT&T Inc (T.N) said last month that it would offer Web-based storage services for enterprises.
Gartner Research estimated earlier this year that global revenues from cloud computing and storage, or the use of the Web to access those services at remote data centers, will climb 31 percent to $3.4 billion this year.
The fledgling field is led by Internet pioneers Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N), but more established technology companies like Verizon, AT&T, IBM (IBM.N) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) are introducing new services this year in a bid to catch up before sales start to boom.