Back in September, I blogged about a strange situation I had noticed in the cloud market: Where Are the Telcos? At that time, Verizon had made their initial announcement about their new CaaS offering for the SMB market, which only seemed to highlight the relative lack of leadership and progress by telcos in the cloud market. With yesterday’s big news about Verizon acquiring Terremark, it appears that the telcos are starting to show up.

Several people commented on the earlier blog that my arguments were mainly true for North American telcos, and as I’ve learned since, outside of North America, the telcos have been far more active in building clouds and embracing this new business model.  But as a global leader, Verizon’s recent activities are a major step in the evolution of the cloud industry, likely to have significant impact on the market overall. While it’s too early to understand how the acquisition of Terremark will play out in terms of specific services, data center locations, etc., what’s clear is that one of the largest telcos with massive resources, broad reach and enterprise credibility has made a real commitment to integrating cloud computing into their business model.

Till now, there really hasn’t been a large, enterprise player to compete with Amazon – Terremark has made impressive progress over the past few years (as we've seen first-hand as a partner), but is still relatively small on its own. With the strength of Verizon behind it, Terremark now has the opportunity to scale in an unprecedented way and extend enterprise cloud computing, leveraging its technology stack and expertise. Stay tuned for more thoughts as the acquisition plans unfold, but one thing is certain: 2011 is off to a very interesting start…

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