IBM Snatches The Weather Company From AWS; Pledges $3B in IoT Investments
IBM has announced that it has signed a deal with the Weather Company. The announcement coincides with IBM’s intentions of spending $3B in efforts to build an Internet of Things business unit.
The Weather Company, which is the parent company of the Weather Channel and Weather.com, will begin hosting much of its infrastructure with SoftLayer. As part of the deal, sources such as BusinessInsider mention that the Weather Company will begin migrating away from Amazon Web Services.
The announcement of the Weather Company’s migration to IBM’s Cloud opens up a world of possibilities. The Weather Company says that it processes over 20 terabytes of data per day. This data translates into the Weather Company being able to generate 26 billion weather forecasts in one day.
Using the power of IBM’s Watson, the Weather Company can feed all of the weather metrics into the cloud to generate sophisticated reports and analysis. The Weather Company also sells the data that it gathers to third party sources. Being able to offer new weather metrics and insights will only help the bottom line of the Weather Company.
WSI is an arm of the Weather Company that gathers data from over 2 billion sensors worldwide and sells the data to third parties. WSI, the fastest growing brand at the Weather Company, will largely rely on the Internet of Things sensors to gather its data.
This data can then be sold to airline companies, application developers, insurance companies and more. IBM notes its $3B investment in IoT will be spread out over the next 4 years. The announcement of IBM’s new IoT division coincides perfectly with the news of the Weather Company deal since the Weather Company could gain significant value from using IoT connected censors that feed data directly into IBM’s cloud.
David Kenny, CEO of the Weather Company, recently said, “Google mapped the earth and we map the atmosphere!”
