Verizon looks to the “cloud”

Article Excerpt

VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS INC. $37 (New York symbol VZ, Conservative Growth Portfolio, Utilities sector; Shares outstanding: 2.8 billion; Market cap: $103.6 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.0; Dividend yield: 5.3%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.verizon.com) is buying Terremark Worldwide Inc. (Nasdaq symbol TMRK), which provides data-storage services in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. The $1.4-billion price is just 4% of Verizon’s 2010 cash flow of $35.3 billion. It aims to complete the purchase in April 2011. Terremark will help Verizon take advantage of growing demand for cloud computing. That’s where data and software are kept on one or more centralized servers. Users connect to these servers over the Internet through a variety of devices. Verizon is a buy. buy…