"The skills, capabilities, salesforce and experience needed to offer cloud services is very different from those of the data centre world," said Wallage. "Cloud opportunities, particularly PaaS, are highly price-sensitive and likely to be dominated by very large players."

He added that there is a major opportunity for data centre players to remain 'cloud-neutral' and support, rather than compete with, cloud players

"For a player like Equinix it already claims that around 25% of revenues come from this segment," he added.