IBM and Weather Company deal is the tip of the iceberg for cloud, data and IoT

Technology and how we consume it is changing faster than we know it. Need proof? Just look at the announcement last night between IBM & Weather Company. It was just a short 4.5 months ago that I was sitting in the Amazon AWS re:Invent keynote on Nov 13, 2014 listening to Weather Company’s EVP, CTO & CIO Bryson Koehler discuss how his company was leveraging Amazon’s AWS to change the game. After the keynote, I had the opportunity to chat with Bryson a bit. It was clear at the time that while Amazon was a key enabler for Weather Company, they could only go so far.

The problem statement

Weather Company is a combination of organizations that brings together a phenomenal amount of data from a myriad of sources. Not all of the sources are sophisticated weather stations. Bryson mentioned that Weather Company is “using data to help consumers gain confidence.” Weather Company uses a number of platforms to produce weather results including Weather Channel, weather.com and Weather Underground. Weather Underground is their early testbed for new methods and tools.

Weather Company produces 15 billion forecasts every day. Those forecasts come billions of sensors across the globe. The forecasts for 2.2 million locations are updated every four hours with billions more updated every 15 minutes. The timeliness and accuracy of their forecasts is what ultimately builds consumer confidence.

Timing

The sheer number of devices makes Weather Company a perfect use-case of leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) powered by Cloud, Data and Analytics. Others may start to see parallels between what Weather Company is doing with their own industry. In today’s competitive market, the speed and accuracy of information is key.

IBM’s strategy demonstrated leadership in the cloud and data/ analytics space with their SoftLayer and Watson solutions. Add in the BlueMix platform and one can see how the connection between these solutions becomes clear. Moving to IoT was the next logical step in the strategy.

Ecosystem Play

The combination of SoftLayer, BlueMix and Watson…plus IoT was no accident. When considering the direction that companies are taking by moving up the stack to the data integration points, IoT is the next logical step. IoT presents the new driver that cloud and data/ analytics enable. BlueMix becomes the glue that ties it all together for developers.

The ecosystem play is key. Ecosystems are everything. Companies are no longer buying point solutions. They are buying into ecosystems that deliver direct business value. In the case of Weather Company, the combination of IBM’s ecosystem and portfolio provides key opportunities to producing a viable solution.

Next Steps…

That being said, the move by IBM & Weather Company should not be seen as a one-off. We should expect to see more enterprises make moves like this toward broader ecosystems like IBM’s.