IBM Leverages Watson in Play to Acquire Weather Company's Big Data Operations
IBM has announced that they have acquired the technology rights to operate the digital assets of the Weather Company.
IBM will put its cloud to work for the Weather Company, whose digital assets include Weather.com and the Weather Channel.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, those in the know speculate that IBM may have spent near $2B for the rights to take over the Weather company’s technical operations.
“The Weather Company’s extremely high-volume data platform, coupled with IBM’s global cloud and the advanced cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, will be unsurpassed in the Internet of Things, providing our clients significant competitive advantage as they link their business and sensor data with weather and other pertinent information in real time,” mentions John Kelly, a Senior Vice President with IBM.
“This powerful cloud platform will position IBM to arm entire industries with deep multimodal insights that will help enterprises gain clarity and take action from the oceans of data being generated around them.”
Just a few weeks ago, CloudWedge published an article called No Surprise: Weather Company Uses Cloud to Forecast Bad Weather.
In the article, we discussed how the Weather Company planned on migrating their remaining workloads into the cloud. At that time, the Weather Company indicated that they had been using IBM’s SoftLayer to roll out infrastructure for the company’s digital assets.
The Weather Company said that only 10% of their servers were in the SoftLayer cloud while the remaining were on AWS. That news must have worked its way up the chain as IBM, with IBM seemingly making the Weather Company an offer they couldn’t refuse.
With IBM taking over the backend for the Weather Company’s digital assets, you can safely assume that the Weather Company’s workloads will begin operating out of SoftLayer data centers.
Since IBM likely spent billions on this project, Big Blue will probably use this as a way to market their cloud services, pitching the fact that your weather is brought to you by Watson in the Cloud.
