The power of the World Wide Web was that for the first time computers — clients and servers — were linked together via networks on a very broad scale, literally billions of systems worldwide. So-called cloud computing — now all the rage — sucks the rest of the computing world up over the wire and firmly deposits it in the network. Not only Web sites, but applications, storage, application programming interfaces and more reside and operate in large, utility-style data centers. Users access those computing resources via a variety of devices, including PCs, hand-helds and consumer electronics platforms.

Whether cloud computing is an innovation that truly takes hold remains to be seen. But the very first utility-style computing systems are right now being defined and delivered. In recent weeks, Web players such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have detailed their cloud computing plans.

“The cloud-based environment consists of vast arrays of commodity computers, with storage and the programs themselves being spread across those arrays for scale and redundancy, and loose coupling between the tiers,” said Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer for Microsoft, in announcing the company's cloud computing service launch. “Independent developers and enterprises alike [are] embracing this model for its cost, resiliency, flexible capacity and geo-distribution.”

Network service providers have interest in this area as well, especially via their Web hosting arms. For now, though, telcos have focused more on simple software-as-a-service (SAAS) opportunities, sort of “cloud-lite.” BT, for one, has detailed plans to “virtualize” its network and computing capabilities and offer them as a service, but it lags behind Web competitors for now.

Service providers also have new opportunities to serve cloud data centers with bandwidth. Such data centers tend to congregate where two resources are plentiful: power, often hydropower, and bandwidth, often sitting adjacent to OC-rich public Internet hubs.

Cloud computing is a classic “disruptive” innovation. It alters the fundamental playing field of delivering computing-intensive applications and services. While it's unlikely that a service provider will be the company that hosts and delivers full-fledged cloud computing platforms, telcos in the future are “going to look much more like a development environment than a telco as we currently know it,” according to analyst firm STL Partners, which has closely tracked cloud and telco platform trends.

That means not only providing bandwidth to support cloud computing, but exposing an array of telco network service APIs — things such as location, user identity, billing, fulfillment, call signaling and completion, and more — that will let carriers play a key role in the cloud computing future.