State-owned Indian operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) has jumped on board the cloud services bandwagon with plans to invest an initial 2 billion Indian rupees (US$45.1 million) in new data center capabilities.

In association with IT services firm Datacraft India Ltd. , which will operate six data centers on the carrier's behalf, BSNL plans to launch a range of managed collocation, hosting, disaster recovery, and cloud services (on demand computing, storage, and network capacity) under the brand "onecloud."

Earlier this year, Tata Communications Ltd. teamed up with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) to offer cloud services to Indian companies, while Bharti Airtel Ltd. (Mumbai: BHARTIARTL) also entered the cloud market. (See Tata Gets Cloudy With Google and Bharti Joins the Cloud Crowd.)

For the full details on BSNL's plans, read the InformationWeek India story, "BSNL forays into data center space."

— Gagandeep Kaur, India Editor, Light Reading