After announcing a partnership earlier this year, IBM now announces it’s intent to acquire the business and prediction elements of the Weather Company. The Weather Channel, the TV presence that started the business, remains a separate organisation, licensing the weather data from IBM.
The deal will close in the first quarter of 2016. It represents elements the $3bn investment IBM is making into Watson and it’s analytics business.
This provides IBM with the weather gathering, forecasting and dissemination capabilities of the Weather Company. It includes the web properties weather.com and wunderground.com. The Weather Underground provides both an API for submitting weather data, APIs for presenting this data in applications. It also provides a web-page for providing this to end-users, as well as mobile apps.
“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. 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.” – John Kelly, SVP, Solutions Portfolio and Research, IBM
“We see the next wave of improved forecasting coming from the intersection of atmospheric science, computer science and analytics. Upon closing of this deal, The Weather Company will continue to be able to help improve the precision of weather forecasts and further deepen IBM’s Watson IoT capabilities by enabling the integration of global atmosphere and weather insights with enterprise information to create disruptive industry solutions that optimize decision-making.” – David Kenny, Chairman and CEO, The Weather Company.
