It’s a sure sign things have turned cloudy (but in a good way) for a solutions provider when said provider spins its cloud services off into a separate business unit. Take Tribridge as a good example of this.

The 16-year-old company out of Tampa has had an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) for some time, but the company this month announced it was spinning its cloud services off into a separate business unit. Headed up by Tony DiBenedetto, who has assumed the role of chairman and CEO of the newly-formed Concerto Cloud Services, the organization is aiming to attract more enterprises with a marketing message around “premium IaaS” offerings.

According to Concerto, its “premium” cloud service provides several potentially great things to customers, including:

“The cloud services industry is locked in a race to lower pricing, but the commodity play of public cloud simply doesn’t work for complex, mission-critical applications like ERP,” said DiBenedetto in a prepared statement. “We saw this moment coming, when organizations would demand a more secure, reliable yet flexible cloud services solution, not simply a cheaper one. That’s what premium is, and that’s what Concerto delivers.”

The value proposition reminds this writer of the one touted by Rackspace, which continues to promise to engage customers on value-add and management instead of by playing the “race to the bottom” price game.

With the new business unit in place, it should be interesting to watch what the company does in the cloud space in the future.