In the Pilot Texas Cloud Offering (PTCO), a small group of agencies were allowed to choose a virtual private cloud-based infrastructure as a service from a marketplace of service providers made available by a cloud broker.

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Despite falling prices for high-speed bandwidth and wireless service, telecom budgets keep growing because of increased usage and new services such as virtual private networks, voice-mail storage and Web hosting.

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Hybrids can be a mix of legacy systems, newer architectures, and private clouds in enterprise data centers together with service provider offers such as colocation for custom resources, micro-nodes, hosted private, virtual private, and public clouds, he says, arguing that such architectures require a rich set of network capabilities to integrate into a seamless whole.

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