At the recent CBX 2010 show in New York City, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had the opportunity to interview the chief marketing and business officer of QTS, Tesh Durvasula.

"QTS is real simple," Durvasula said, "3.5 million square feet of the most secure, reliable data center space in the country. We're currently the third largest provider of data center services, we've got offices in New York, Richmond, Miami, Atlanta, Santa Clara, and we've got some cities in the Midwest - Indianapolis and Wichita."

The company has twelve centers in eight states overall, and "we're busy expanding," he said. "We've just received $175 million of equity capital from General Atlantic, a large global growth fund headquartered in New York and Greenwich, Connecticut. So we've got plenty of money and a lot of new centers."

Tehrani observed that as cloud computing's positioned to take off, the company seems to be positioned well. Durvasula noted that they have a new program, called "the three 'C's - custom data center, co-location and cloud. And our cloud product is a unique product in the marketplace."

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If you needed any more proof that the telecom value chain has changed significantly in the last ten years, today's explosion of third-party application developers and content providers delivering applications, video and other Web capabilities to customers should be proof enough.

That's the new value chain. And if you're a service provider, then according to Alcatel-Lucent officials, you're in a good position.

Service providers can playa broader role in today's new value chain, say Alcatel-Lucent officials, pointing to research which, they say, shows that "application developers and content providers are willing to pay for access to your high-value network capabilities."

And why would they do that? Because, Alcatel-Lucent officials say, "it gives them better contextual information for more effective targeting of their applications and content."

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According to a recent study most technology experts and "highly engaged" Internet users -- 71 percent of them, in fact - say cloud computing will become "more dominant than the desktop" in the next decade.

In other words, the environment in which most people will work will be via mobile and Web-based applications, such as Facebook and Google Docs (says an analysis of the study at Marketing Profs, if you know how to get paid to work on Facebook let us know) more than desktop software.

The study was conducted by Elon University and the Pew Research Center.

In all, the study found, 71 percent of those surveyed agree with the statement "By 2020, most people won't do their work with software running on a general purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones. Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system."

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At the recent CBX 2010 show in New York City, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had the opportunity to interview J.R. Reidenbach, the southeast regional sales vice president at Providea, a managed services provider.

Reidenbach said that his company sells "video conferencing, telepresence and high-definition video conferencing, as well as peripherals and audio-visual integration capabilities," noting that Providea is also a conferencing service provider.

Conferencing, he said, is a way for companies to come together and meet globally "in a multipoint video conference world." Providea provides all the managed service capabilities surrounding that, "which allow them to use their video conferencing in a reliable way, as well as provide a way for them to interconnect to other carriers, customers and suppliers out there," which typically they couldn't do because of a closed network environment.

What Providea actually does then, Reidenbach says, is to "provide the infrastructure up in the cloud."

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At the recent CBX 2010 show in New York City, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had the opportunity to interview Softlayer's vice president of business development Sean Charnock, who described the company as a virtualized data center services company, "also known as an infrastructure-as-a-service" vendor.

"We focus on abstracting the data center out of the day-to-day processes of organizations that don't need to be in that side of the business," Charnock said. "We take everything data-center centric up to the OS level, from a compute, network, broadband, data center facilities, all of the elements that go along with that. We abstract all that to the customer, wrap it all together and then give it to them on a month to month basis."

He added that they can provide the service "even as granularly as hourly now."

Tehrani asked if that allowed clients to expand their server requirements in a virtual manner, of if they still needed to deal with individual virtualized servers.

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