Google remains firmly in third place in the cloud market, and that is true in the telecoms space, but it is making significant gains on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. In the past week, it has announced strategic partnerships with Orange and Verizon, and other major cloud partners include AT&T, Telefónica and Telecom Italia. It seems to be leveraging three main advantages in the operators’ eyes. These are: Their fear of being locked into a single powerful webscaler as surely as they were previously locked into their network vendors. Verizon and AT&T, for instance, are sharing their cloud partnerships around. Verizon has agreements with AWS and Google, while AT&T has Azure, IBM and AWS as key partners in different areas…