AT&T, BT, Orange Business Services and Verizon Business (News - Alert) have "can now compete with established players from the IT industry" in the cloud computing arena, say researchers at Ovum. 

“The major telcos have a long heritage in providing managed data center services and hosting and have combined this with their networking and security expertise to meet the needs of customers for cloud computing services," says Peter Hall, Ovum (News - Alert) principal analyst. See http://about.datamonitor.com/media/archives/4674 for more details. 

Some observers have speculated that the telcos might not fare so well in some parts of the cloud computing ecosystem, particularly in parts of the ecosystem requiring more application expertise. That might well be true, but there seems little reason to believe telcos cannot be major players in those parts of the business that are more centrally related to managed hosting. 

Telcos are well accustomed to managing mission-critical data centers. That, in essence, is what modern switching and routing facilities are. 

“All of the players reviewed in the report see cloud computing as leveraging their core competencies and Orange (News - Alert) has coined the term ‘IT operator’ to reflect its new role in IT services by analogy with its traditional role as a network operator," says Hall.

"We believe that the global and major regional telcos will become strong players across the full spectrum of cloud computing services including Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service," says Hall. That makes sense. 

Consumer voice services always have been managed services, and their roles as Internet access providers likewise already has required telcos to become managed service providers in that area as well.

It might not yet, and might never be the case, that most telcos can compete directly with larger system integrators that manage enterprise apps down to the desktop. But there is credible reason to believe that managing large scale, mission critical server farms is an issue for the larger telcos. 

How well major telcos can compete with "computing as a service" offerings such as Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) likely is the more immediate issue, not the direct competition with large system integrators and outsourcing shops.