Tata Communications, the worldwide consulting service provider, is building a network of data centers throughout the world to serve the small business market. To do that, the company is using Cloud.com, which Citrix acquired today in a deal estimated at $200 million.

Tata is building the cloud infrastructure to provide the small  and mid-size business market with SaaS offerings.

Tata has launched services in India and Singapore. From Singapore, it covers other countries in Southeast Asia.  Tata is now setting its sights on North America, Europe and South Africa –  where it will expand over the next 18 months.

Tata points to a growing trend. Consulting services are becoming IaaS providers. And the reasons are clear. According to the Business-Standard in India, Tata expects to earn$250 million in revenues over the next three years from its cloud services.

Gartner sees cloud spending increasing 7% over the next year. Total spending is expected to be be $3.7 trillion, which is an astronomical number and quetionable but still reflects the overall size of the market. Not surpirsingly, telecommunications companies are expected to account for some of the greatest amount of spending, increasing to $2.1 trillion. The shift in IT spending for cloud-based services is expected to double to $846 billion.

Services Angle

This all points to why Citrix is well positioned for winning big in cloud infrastructure development. Tata wants security and the strength of a multi-tenant environment to service the tens of thousands of businesses that are looking to the cloud for SaaS providers and infrastructure for application development and a multitude of other offerings.

Tata could get that with VMware but there is a level of managed services that comes with such a deployment. That was evident today at VMware’s event. VMware is s complete suite that does benefit customers with extensive virtual infrastructures. But for offering services, the new Citrix infrastructure makes perfect sense for a provider such as Tata.