Back in 1998 when Google Search started to replace AltaVista, could you imagine the company would be laying fiber in Kansas City in 2012 to offer a 100 times faster Internet service? Or that the New York Stock Exchange would evolve from a trading floor in its 1903 building on Broad Street, to offering virtual and physical colocated computing infrastructure services in its New Jersey ?

The explosion of these new cloud services is being delivered through a mix of providers -- let's call them "New Service Providers" -- emerging from the ranks of established telecommunications companies, data center infrastructure providers and unexpected players like Google, Amazon and the NYSE. Business giants HP, Oracle and IBM are also making moves to migrate into cloud services by building on the full suite of technologies they have amassed over the decades.

RESEARCH:

Each understands how critical the network is for cloud services. Each wants to offer a more intelligent, completely integrated service rather than simple "dumb pipe" bandwidth or "dumb cloud" colocation facilities.

Most telecommunication service providers today are wrestling with ways to break into .