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.

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The software defined data centre may be the promised land for providers struggling to deliver cloud services cost effectively at scale, but remains in the early stage of development.

Imagine a data centre uncluttered by legacy, dedicated network, server and storage hardware consolidated to the point where every application, service or process which can be delivered as a virtualised software function has been moved onto next generation architecture.

This proposed acquisition of BTI Systems looks like good news for Juniper Networks from a number of different perspectives. For one, BTI is not short of customers – its website lists a total of 380 including data centre specialists Equinix and Interxion and cloud hosting company Rackspace.

The concept of the software defined data centre (SDDC) has been with us for a few years now, but it is only recently that the network virtualisation platforms needed to make it happen have matured to point where real time deployments become possible.