Dive Brief:
- German industrial company Bosch announced Wednesday plans to launch its own cloud network to enable its wide range of appliances to more easily connect to the Internet.
- Bosch is hoping its engineering roots will boost it ahead of the competition when it comes to advancing IoT initiatives.
- The company will base the network in Germany in order to allay any customer concerns about the data security of U.S.-owned servers.
Dive Insight:
Launching its own cloud network will put Bosch in competition with U.S.-based cloud companies. Global sales in the public cloud market will likely exceed $200 billion this year, according to Gartner.
"There are product companies like Bosch trying to add software and services and there are IT companies trying to get into the physical space. The race is completely open," said Bosch Chief Executive Volkmar Denner during a conference in Berlin.
Bosch said it will run approximately 50 of its own in-house applications on the cloud this year before offering its services to other companies sometime in 2017. The company plans to eventually open data centers in other areas of the world as well.
According to the company, more than five million devices are currently connected via Bosch's IoT software suite. Gartner recently predicted there will be 25 billion or more IoT devices connected to the Internet by 2020.
