Cloud Data Platform to be Foundation for IBM IoT, Supporting
Tens of Millions of Users and Billions of Interactions Per
Day
Global Expansion of weather.com Aims to Dramatically Expand
User Base
The Weather Company CEO David
Kenny to Lead IBM Watson Unit
ARMONK, New York and ATLANTA, Jan. 29,
2016 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced
that it has closed the acquisition of The Weather Company's B2B,
mobile and cloud-based web-properties, weather.com, Weather
Underground, The Weather Company brand and WSI, its global
business-to-business brand. The cable TV segment was not acquired
by IBM, but will license weather forecast data and analytics from
IBM under a long-term contract.
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The combination of technology and expertise from the two
companies will serve as the foundation for the Watson IoT Cloud
platform, building on a $3B
commitment IBM made in March 2015 to
invest in the Internet of Things. The deal broadly extends the
scale and capability of IBM's cloud data services platform and
expands The Weather Company's enterprise services capabilities and
consumer reach to a global scale, including plans to bring
weather.com to new major markets such as China and India.
"The Weather Company's extremely high-volume data platform,
coupled with IBM Cloud and the advanced cognitive computing
capabilities of Watson, is unsurpassed in the Internet of Things,"
said John E. Kelly, IBM's senior
vice president, cognitive solutions and research. "This rich
platform provides our clients significant competitive advantage as
they link their business and sensor data with weather and other
pertinent information in real-time. We can arm entire industries
with deep multimodal insights to help enterprises gain clarity and
take action on the oceans of data being generated around them."
At the close of the acquisition, IBM announced a number of
related initiatives:
Beyond Weather: The Weather Company Cloud Data Platform to
Serve as Backbone for Watson IoT
The Weather Company's dynamic cloud data platform, which powers
the fourth most-used mobile app daily in the United States and handles up to 26 billion
inquiries to its cloud-based services each day, will run across IBM
Cloud data centers globally and serve as the technology backbone of
IBM's data services and Watson IoT businesses.
Leveraging one of the world's most scalable, high performance
and flexible data platforms, IBM can now collect an even larger
variety and higher velocity of data sets from billions of IoT
sensors around the world while also serving out real-time
information and insights to tens of millions of users worldwide.
The new platform offers developers greater flexibility to access,
store and analyze IoT sensor data and to create new apps with
richer and deeper insights powered by IBM Watson.
IBM is dedicating more than 2500 developers worldwide to help
its clients and partners collect, analyze and act upon entirely new
forms of IoT data resulting from the proliferation of automobile
and airplane telematics, building and environmental sensors,
wearable devices, medical implants, weather stations, smartphones,
social media, manufacturing lines and supply chains, among
others.
weather.com to Expand Globally
IBM announced plans to expand weather.com into five new major
markets, including China,
India, Brazil, Mexico and Japan, with the goal of increasing its global
user base by hundreds of millions over the next three years. The
company plans to leverage local media partnerships and the IBM
Cloud network of over 45 data centers to drive much more local and
personalized content to each region.
CEO David Kenny to Lead IBM
Watson Unit
David Kenny, who was chairman and
CEO of The Weather Company, and previously president of Akamai
Technologies, assumes leadership of the IBM Watson platform
business. He brings deep expertise in building platforms used by
tens of millions of people daily as IBM continues to scale the
Watson technology platform. He will oversee the build out of the
Watson partner and developer ecosystem, key APIs and emerging
solutions powered by Watson. He joins Harriet Green, formerly CEO of Thomas Cook, who leads Watson IoT, Education and
Commerce, and Deborah DiSanzo,
formerly CEO of Philips Healthcare, who leads Watson Health.
Michael Rhodin, who launched the
Watson business and drove the formation of Watson Health and Watson
IoT, will now lead Watson Business Development. He will identify
and incubate the next major industries and domains for Watson and
will oversee related acquisition strategy.
The Weather Company will be led by Cameron Clayton, who was most recently its
president, product and technology, and becomes part of IBM's Data
and Analytics Platform business unit.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
WSI, The Weather Company's business-to-business brand, will now
be known as The Weather Company, an IBM Business.
For more information visit http://www.ibm.com/ibmandweather.
Media contact:
Vineeta Durani
VP, Communications, IBM
(917) 855-2680
vineeta.durani@us.ibm.com