A new report from analysts Ovum has identified major global telecommunications companies, including Orange Business Services, as a major force in cloud computing. It says that over the past year telcos have expanded their services to compete with the established players from the IT industry.

Analyst Peter Hall says that telcos background in data centers, hosting, networks and security are proving decisive in developing cloud computing services. "All of the players reviewed in the report see cloud computing as leveraging their core competencies and Orange has coined the term 'IT operator' to reflect its new role in IT services by analogy with its traditional role as a network operator," he says. "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 (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)."

Ovum and the other analyst firms in the Datamonitor Group are also holding an interesting session in October on the benefits of moving to a cloud computing model, and I'll report back from the session in due course.