Spain’s Telefónica announced the launch of a regional cloud hosting service targeting the Latin American corporate segment, including large companies and government.

Named “Virtual Hosting 2.0,” the offering is supported by VCE’s VBlock infrastructure and will be provided through five interconnected data centers across Latin America. Those centers are located in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru.

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Telefónica’s new offering is another example of how telecom operators are embracing cloud services in order to become an important player in the market, a trend highlighted by recent surveys from Pyramid and Infonetics Research.

Telefónica joins other telecom operators that have launched cloud computing services across Latin America. For instance, Brazilian operator Oi recently launched its Smart Cloud platform, while América Móvil unveiled plans for cloud computing services across subsidiaries in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil.

Virtual Hosting 2.0 is designed to provide IT resources as a service and makes it easier for companies and governments in their transition to cloud computing. Initially Virtual Hosting 2.0 will include services such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), virtual data centers, private cloud services and business continuity services, among others.

While launching this service, Telefónica said it aims to differentiate itself by basing the virtual hosting in the VCE VBlock platform.

Daniel Jimenez, business segment director at Telefónica Latin America, noted “this solution, which is in collaboration with Cisco and VCE, further strengthens the pillars of regional and global supply Telefónica for the corporate segment, based communication solutions, mobility, cloud services and information security.”