IBM has announced it has opened the Watson Internet of Things (IoT) global headquarters, which will also serve as its first European Watson innovation centre, in Munich, Germany. The company has stressed it is its largest investment in Europe in more than two decades.
It will use the new centre to strengthen its position with a launch of the new offerings, capabilities and ecosystem partners and help extend the cognitive computing further to the connected devices, the company says.
Earlier this year IBM announced it would invest over $3bn to address in particular the needs of clients striving to capitalise on the increasing interconnectedness driven by IoT.
The Munich centre is expected to bring together over 1,000 IBM developers, consultants, researchers and designers to engage with clients and partners and build together the connected solutions comprising the elements of both cognitive computing and the IoT.
Simultaneously the company has launched eight new Watson IoT client centres in Germany, Asia and the Americas.
The IBM’s Watson utilises the cognitive computing system that aims to understand the natural languages and learn the reason from the interactions. The cognitive systems are said to make sense of the 80% of the world’s unstructured data. At the moment, the company plans to deliver Watson APIs services on its IoT Cloud Platform to accelerate the development of cognitive IoT solutions and services.
According to IBM, the market of data embedded in intelligent devices represents a remarkable business opportunity with projections to reach $1.7 trillion by 2020.
The IBM’s centre in Munich will also offer to its clients, start-ups, academia and the IoT partner community an access to its cloud-based IoT platform to help develop IoT solutions and services, with a particular dedication to the representatives of the automotive, electronics, healthcare, insurance and industrial manufacturers sectors.
“The Internet of Things will soon be the largest single source of data on the planet, yet almost 90 percent of that data is never acted upon. With its unique abilities to sense, reason and learn, Watson opens the door for the enterprises, governments and individuals to finally harness this real-time data, compare it with historical data sets and deep reservoirs of accumulated knowledge, and then find unexpected correlations that generate new insights to benefit business and society alike,” says Harriet Green, general manager, Watson IoT and Education.
IBM says that currently it works with more than 4,000 IoT clients in 170 countries through 1,400 partners and has 750 IoT patents targeted to help combine and analyse data from different sources.
- French IT consultancy and services group Sopra Steria has announced plans to launch its European centre of excellence for cognitive computing next year in the North of France, in Lille. This means Sopra Steria is entering the IBM Watson ecosystem and plans to leverage this technology to help its customers create new Watson powered applications, it says. The company will be also using IBM Watson Developer Cloud to test and deploy new business ideas aimed at assisting its clients with their digital transformation initiatives based on solutions embedded with Watson cognitive computing technology. The French group says it is looking forward to join the IBM Watson community and participate in a development of new cognitive based solutions for business. The creation of the IBM Watson cognitive skills centre in France will expand upon the existing Sopra Steria’s partnership with IBM as the company is certified in the design, delivery and management of mission-critical solutions built on IBM software and hardware.