Researchers are saying these companies have made considerable progress in the arena in just over a year, and in terms of services, can now compete with established players from the IT industry.

Peter Hall, report author and Ovum principal analyst, said: "The major telcos have a long heritage in providing managed data centre services and hosting and have combined this with their networking and security expertise to meet the needs of customers for 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."

These companies are likely to have offerings across the full spectrum of cloud computing services including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS).