Telecommunications companies should look at establishing partnerships with IT service providers to take full advantage of the growth of cloud computing, according to industry analysts Ovum.

"Much has been made of the potential for telcos to leverage existing assets,” says Ovum analyst, Mark Giles.

"However, while telcos’ assets do provide them with some key advantages over other cloud providers, there are a number of significant challenges that they face.”

Aside from the difficulty telcos may experience achieving brand acceptance, cloud services require a faster pace of innovation compared with traditional network services, Giles says.

"While this is a challenge for the back office,” Giles says, "it also raises questions as to how telcos price and monitor the profitability of these services.”

Partnerships with IT providers have been shown to be effective by firms like Telstra in Australia and SFR in France, Giles says.

"In addition to helping them overcome their internal operational challenges, a partnership can help telcos to expand their number of sales channels and profit from an assocation with a premium IT services brand.”