Multi-cloud continues to gather momentum as leading suppliers announce products and services designed to help IT departments provision, manage and secure the many different cloud services they lease from different providers simultaneously.

These announcements mark two standout trends: firstly, the continuing shift away from product based hardware or software license fees into a service-orientated model that offers both more flexibility and less risk of overpaying for underused infrastructure for the buyer; and secondly the establishment of an all-important recurring revenue streams for the supplier.

AT&T is just the latest telco to offload some or all of its data centres to a new generation of non-competitive colocation companies as it shifts emphasis to core connectivity provision and cloud service delivery from third party hosting facilities.