IBM plans to acquire The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web properties, including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand. The Weather Company is currently owned by a consortium comprising the private equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital, and NBCUniversal.
The deal does not include the TV segment – The Weather Channel, which will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract.
IBM is seeking to integrate weather expertise into a new Watson IoT Unit and Watson IoT Cloud platform. The idea is to bring together IBM’s cognitive and analytics platform and The Weather Company’s dynamic cloud data platform, which powers the fourth most-used mobile app daily in the United States and handles 26 billion inquiries to its cloud-based services each day.
“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,” said John Kelly, senior vice president, IBM Solutions Portfolio and Research. “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.”
