• The German appliance manufacturer Bosch has announced it is building its own cloud to serve customers that connect their Bosch devices to its own-brand Internet of Things. Once it’s up and running, Bosch will look to sell cloud services to other businesses—presumably adjacent manufacturers and service providers (but not direct competitors), e.g., suppliers of consumables such as soap or spare parts, and non-competing consumer product makers.

• It is not the first time a company operating in a sector other than ICT has planned to turn its ICT investment into a profit centre. Could this be one of the few successful examples?

Bosch announced at the Bosch ConnectedWorld event in Berlin last week the launch of its own cloud for web-based services. The Bosch IoT Cloud includes technical infrastructure owned by the company as well as platform and software offerings for the Internet of things (IoT), enabling solutions for smart cities and the connected home. To begin with, Bosch will use it for in-house solutions. From 2017, the Bosch IoT Cloud will be made available as a service to other companies, putting it in direct competition with IT and cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.