There is of course no greater example of an enterprise making a business from selling excess cloud capacity than Amazon springing AWS from its loins.

David Linthicum, the cloud curator for Gigaom Research, notes that some other businesses are tempted to monetize a little excess capacity or to otherwise position themselves favorably by becoming small-scale cloud providers themselves. In asking, “What’s up with enterprises becoming cloud providers?“, David finds that such companies are actually most often providing services to customers or even to partners as an enhancement to their business relationships.

So no, they’re not angling to become Amazons. Primarily it’s a ready way to share information or access to internal applications in a secure and controlled environment–and to bring customers and partners further into their enterprise ecosystem.