IBM has acquired the Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web-properties. Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.
Under this acquisition, IBM will own weather.com, Weather Underground, The Weather Company brand and WSI, the Weather Company’s global business-to-business brand.
The cable TV segment has not been acquired by IBM and following the deal, Weather Company will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract.
With this acquisition, IBM wants to bring weather.com to emerging markets such as China and India.
IBM senior vice president, John E Kelly said: "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."
"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."
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The Weather Company’s cloud data platform powers the fourth most-used mobile app daily in the United States alone and handles up to 26 billion inquiries to its cloud-services on a daily basis. Now, these services will be run from IBM’s cloud platform.
With Weather.com’s platform, IBM wants to collect a larger variety and high velocity of data sets from billions of IoT sensors across the world, in addition to serving out real-time information and insights to millions of users worldwide.
IBM wants to expand Weather.com to new markets such as China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Japan and wants to create a global user base with hundreds of millions over the course of few years. It also wants to integrate Weather.com services across all of its global cloud centres.
As part of this acquisition, the Weather Company chairman and CEO, David Kenny will lead the IBM Watson Business Unit.
IBM believes that his expertise in building platforms used by millions of people daily can contribute to the development of Watson technology platform.
IBM and The Weather Company have already been working together since 2015. IBM was using data inputs from the network of about 100,000 weather sensors for its machine-learning-based analytics services.
