LAS VEGAS -- Interop -- Cloud services were a dominant topic here this week. Hours of discussion, conference sessions and interviews led to the following conclusions:

It's too soon for cloud service standards
Telecom service providers typically want to move to standardize services, but that's not yet on anyone's mind. Doug Junkins, CTO of NTT America Inc. , and Scott Cain, head Global Portfolio Management, BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA), both agreed on this point during a panel I moderated at the Carrier Cloud Forum. There are still too many things to work out to begin cementing things in standards, although standard APIs for connecting pieces of cloud services will become important. A day later, Chris Gesell, chief cloud strategist at Verizon Enterprise Solutions , agreed and went a step further, saying Verizon doesn't want to commit to standards now and get locked into an approach that loses a VHS-Betamax battle down the road. Even Tom Mornini, CTO and co-founder of EngineYard, a cloud platform provider, agrees that it's too early to nail down standards.

But end-users can't get locked into cloud solutions
On this point, cloud will have to remain different from other networking services, where term contracts are the norm and CPE is tied into the network offering. At an Interop panel on cloud moderated by Randy Bias, CTO of cloud consultant Cloudscaling , a diverse set of industry experts agreed that end-users must be able to move from one cloud platform to another or pull their services back onto their own premises. That thinking confirmed what Mark Thiele, VP of data center strategy for ServiceMesh, an IT software and services company, said at our Carrier Cloud Forum a day earlier. This will be a key trust factor for early adoption of cloud. (See Clouds Need More Than SLAs.)

Network operators who want to develop cloud services should move fast -- with caution
The battle for the cloud already includes Web providers such as Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Rackspace and some, including Bias, think telecom service providers won't win the battle for green-field apps versus these more nimble Web competitors with their commodity pricing:

That said, service providers can leverage their networks, their relationships with businesses but they need to proceed carefully -- what Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR)'s Mike Marcellin calls "placing many small bets" versus a few large ones, and staying close to the roulette wheel, so to speak, to be ready to double-down on those with greater chances of success. (See Characteristics of Cloud Computing.)

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— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading