The Weather Co. acquisition extends a bet that so-called cognitive computing by IBM’s Watson division, which draws insights from vast amounts of data, will drive future growth. The company announced on Wednesday that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire most of the assets of the Weather Co, including its Weather.com website, a large number of weather data collection points, consumer and business applications and a staff of more than 900 people.
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Once the world’s mightiest computer company, the pioneering IBM has been struggling in its move away from computer hardware and into services.
One possibility IBM has floated in the past is the correlation of retail sales trends with weather patterns to help companies make decisions. “IBM is committed to using Spark as the foundation for its industry-leading analytics platform, and by offering a fully managed Spark service on IBM Bluemix, data professionals can access and analyze their data faster than ever before, with significantly reduced complexity”.
The Weather Company and IBM may seem like an odd pairing at first, but IBM already has a partnership with the Weather Company to jointly sell its weather data services and incorporate that data into its cloud-based (no pun intended) Watson services.
IBM did not say how much it has paid for the outfit.
For example, IBM would be able to provide forecasts to drug companies and pharmacies who rely on the forecasts to predict when to increase supplies of allergy medications, and agriculture companies who use the data to maximize crop yields.
IBM said the insights derived from data can be useful to many industries: it noted that predictive weather analytics coupled with real-time analysis of social media and other related data can help retailers and distributors maintain availability of vital goods in times of need. Suitors zeroed in on the digital businesses and its weather forecasting app, which contains radar maps and pollen level indexes – rather than the fully distributed cable network.
The Weather Co.’s private equity owners – Bain Capital and Blackstone Group – had been shopping the company’s assets for a few time. The trio paid $3.5 billion for the company in 2008, reported Re/code. In late 2013, the television channel endured a bitter public fight with DirecTV over carriage fees, and earlier this year Verizon FiOS dropped the channel altogether. Also as part of the deal, the Company’s CEO David Kenny is also expected to join IBM once the deal is done, which will further strengthen the overall management of the firm.
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At this time, it’s not certain what will happen to The Weather Channel, which has in recent times found it hard to create the right mix of forecasts, commentary and entertainment based programming.
