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IBM Names David Kenny New Head of Watson

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Watsonby Angela Guess

Ingrid Lunden reports in TechCrunch, “IBM is taking another step to expand its Watson AI business and build its presence in areas like IoT: today the company announced that its acquisition of the Weather Company — the giant weather media and data group — has now officially closed. IBM is not disclosing the value of the deal: it was originally reported to be in the region of $2 billion, but sources close to IBM tell us this was inaccurate. (For context, the Weather Company was previously acquired in 2008 for $3.5 billion by a consortium that included Bain, Blackstone and NBC Universal.)”

Lunden goes on, “As part of the deal, IBM is making some changes: First, the Weather Company’s cloud platform will now run on IBM’s Cloud data centers (recall that it once was a big client of AWS). That platform will now power all of IBM’s wider push into data services and Watson’s Internet of Things business. This will bring a massively bigger amount of data into the mix, covering what IBM describes as billions of IoT sensors.”

He continues, “IBM will also use its weight to scale the Weather Company’s business: the company plans to expand weather.com into five more markets including China, India and Brazil ‘immediately’, as well as integrate it into IBM’s 45 global cloud centers. IBM is also making an executive change: David Kenny, who had been the CEO of the Weather Company, will take on a newly-created role at IBM running the company’s wider Watson platform business.”

Read more here.

photo credit: IBM

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