If reports are to be believed, the big-brand global telcos are positioning themselves to be tough players in the cloud computing market as corporate attitudes to cloud warm.

According to researchers Ovum, AT&T, BT, Orange Business Services and Verizon Business could compete with established players from the IT industry in the cloud computing arena.

The telcos have a long heritage in providing managed end to end networks, 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.

Some observers have considered the telcos might not fare so well in some parts of the cloud computing ecosystem, mostly in parts of the ecosystem requiring more application expertise. Telcos are well familiarized to organizing mission-critical data centers. That, in essence, is what modern switching and routing facilities are.

Telcos are bound to succeed here because they already have many of the key skills on tap the market.  They have a long heritage in the managed data centre and hosting businesses and when you put this together with their networking and security expertise it starts to look like a strong package.

The key for the telcos is the ability to offer end-to-end management of the network. This attracts mostly to large corporate and big companies with mission-critical applications.

Reimbursing a long-term path to offer improved service for Cloud connections along with standard Internet access was most probably one of the ideas in the back of the collective mind of Verizon when it stroked out its ‘joint statement’ with Google on Internet neutrality.

Certainly, the ability to offer something in between an enthusiastic but expensive end-to-end network, and a cost-effective but much cheaper Internet access offer would clearly be another big plus for carriers eyeing up the corporate cloud market and wanting – in the US at least – to make sure they didn’t run into regulatory problems through offering enhanced quality of service.