German manufacturer Bosch says it’s launching it’s own ‘IoT cloud’ to provide a central connectivity hub for its different IoT initiatives. Having established itself (and hopefully built a healthy lead over rivals) it says it will make its IoT ‘cloud’ available to other IoT providers in due course as well. Bosch apparently wants to do a sort of  ‘Amazon’ where it uses its own platform to host potential rivals.

Like other industrials, Bosch sees that IoT’s disruptive potential includes being able to make 'information the product' and to turn at least some product businesses - dishwashers, cookers, etc  - into service businesses. It would like, in other words, to get there first and be the disruptor rather than one of the disrupted.

To that end it says it has a ‘cloud’ (and who hasn’t these days) which it will run from its own German computer centre in Stuttgart (this also capitalising on European fears over US-based data security).  

Bosch says it will  run around 50 of its own in-house applications on the cloud this year and plans to open everything up to other companies from 2017. Other global data centres are also being planned. Its exact spending plans have not been revealed.

Bosch says it now has all its pieces in place to be a leader in this sort of IoT, including its own IoT Suite which handles the connectivity side of the equation and already serves over 5 million devices. Bosch claims the IoT cloud completes the line-up.