Service providers that get in the market early and expand aggressively are likely to become defaults leaders, in much the same way as

Safaricom became dominant in the mobile money arena by launching M-Pesa early on, he said.

"The ability to scale .... will determine the rate of growth both in terms of revenue and actual size for entrants into the public cloud market and will likely result into a customer lock-in model similar to the trends witnessed in the evolution of M-pesa services," Macharia said.