Building Clouds within Clouds

One of the more subtle aspects of cloud computing that solution providers need to consider going forward is all the clouds within clouds that will soon start popping up across the entire IT ecosystem.

Case in point is the launch this week of the Predix Cloud by GE. Built on top of an implementation of the open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment provided by the Pivotal unit of EMC that is scheduled to be generally available in 2016, Vince Campisi, CIO and general manager for cloud services at GE Software, said GE will not only use this platform to host its own applications, but also those of its customers. In effect, that means that GE is now offering cloud services in competition to any number of cloud service providers.

In the case of GE, Campisi said GE will focus its cloud efforts on industrial customers that need to tap into big data analytics applications and in time will even develop a channel around the Predix Cloud service.

GE, of course, is hardly new to the software game. The world’s largest company already builds a number of vertical applications that are projected to generate $6 billion in revenue in in 2015; up from $4 billion in 2014. The Predix Cloud essentially provides GE with a way to extend the distribution reach of GE software. In fact, an implementation of the Predix Cloud can already be found running on both Amazon Web Services and Verizon cloud, which GE has been using primarily for application development and testing.

Naturally, to most solution providers the GE playbook has a familiar ring. Like a certain well-known online bookseller, GE is trying to monetize the massive investments in IT that it needs to make to support the rest of its business. In the case of GE, that means leveraging the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) to change the way large industry equipment is maintained. Instead of replacing equipment based on an average of when that equipment is expected to fail, Campisi said GE will be able to more precisely know when to replace any specific equipment, such as an aircraft engine, based on the data being collected by the engine. Longer term, that means that GE will in more cases essentially be renting that equipment to customers rather than actually selling it. At the core of that effort will be a set of big data analytics applications that GE will expose to customers using an application programming interface.

The thing about all this that solution providers should note is that GE and Amazon are not likely to be the only billion dollar entities spinning up cloud services that they intend to sell. As such, solution providers just might want to give some thought to who they might actually be partnering in the cloud next because chances are it won’t be the current list of usual cloud computing suspects.