There’s a reason Apple (News - Alert) coined the term “there’s an app for that.” In today’s business world, there really is, at least almost always, an app for something we need. Apps have increased e-mail and response times, open the door for mobile advertising, lowered technology costs and increased telecommuting opportunities.

For businesses in need of making their own apps with all of their benefits, there’s AT&T’s (News - Alert) Platform as a Service (PaaS), a new service that gives businesses the power to make their own app in the cloud, no code writing required, and have it accessible from anywhere.

According to AT&T’s release on the announcement, PaaS comes with a library of 50 pre-built apps which can be customized or used as-is, as well as a slew of development tools to make apps mobile.

For developers, AT&T said the platform gives line-of-business managers the ability to easily create new enterprise-grade applications, distribute and manage across the entire user base without downtime. Independent software vendors can accelerate the time to market of their apps, while enterprise developers can consolidate back-office applications into a single environment that allows them to be accessible by PCs or mobile devices.

AT&T said its PaaS is integrated with AT&T's network-based cloud to offer a complete enterprise-grade package, allowing app developers to build business apps that can take advantage of the scale, performance, capacity, security and reliability of the AT&T global network.

“AT&T Platform as a Service is like rocket fuel for developing cloud apps,” said Steve Caniano, vice president of Hosting and Cloud Services at AT&T Business Solutions in the release. “This is another step in our commitment to helping businesses deliver cloud-based solutions, and we are unique in our ability to surround the ease of use of Platform as a Service with the flexibility, reliability and security of the AT&T global network.”

Key Features of AT&T Platform as a Service:

• A complete cloud-based development and deployment platform
• A high-performance, redundant and scalable infrastructure to run online applications and databases
• Development tools to mobilize applications
• Integrated social networking features
• 24/7/365 infrastructure monitoring, management and support

The AT&T solution is billed monthly on a per-user basis, and being cloud-based means it can scale up or down depending on demand – and be billed accordingly.