Recognizing the emergence of a strong demand for cognitive computing, IBM has made the decision to give birth to a new business unit that will deal specifically on technologies related to the supercomputer.
The Blue chip company announces IBM Watson Group, a new division that will bring together software, services, research, experts and market forces to accelerate the development and marketing of new classes of applications dedicated to the cognitive informatics and big data. IBM will invest one billion dollar in the Watson Group, out of which 100 million dollars for investments in venture capital to support start-ups that develop cognitive applications by Watson Developers Cloud, launched last November.
The new division consists of about 2,000 IBM employees. IBM also plans to open a new headquarters in Silicon Alley, the technology hub of New York. The team will be composed of coders, researchers, developers, marketers and industry experts to collaborate with customers and partners to help develop and launch faster products based on the cognitive technology solutions.
New Era for IBM
IBM believes that the technology is mature enough and ready for the market that Watson will become the center of a division dedicated to this new generation of applications. IBM wanted to use artificial intelligence technology in the field of health, retail, telecoms, banking and insurance. For healthcare, these practical applications have advanced oncology diagnostics thanks to the contributions of Watson.
IBM said Watson is a revolutionary platform that represents a new era of computing through its ability to interact in natural language, to deal with large amounts of diverse and heterogeneous data and learn from each interaction. It helps professionals in quick and easy understanding of the data, while increasing over time their knowledge and sources of value.
The goal is to simplify continuing the commitment announced last November with the launch of IBM’s Watson Developers Cloud, where third-party developers will be able to find a toolkit development, educational content and access to Watson APIs. Through this initiative, developers will have the opportunity to have a complete control on the front end of Watson.
In parallel with the announcement of the IBM Watson Group division, the company announced the launch of three new services – IBM Watson Discovery Advisor, intended to support research and development, shortening the time required for the formulation of hypotheses and conclusions, IBM’s Watson Analytics for the visual representation of the information revealed by big data, and finally the IBM Watson Explorer, to help enterprise users to discover and share data-driven discoveries in an easier and faster by simplifying the launching of big data within the organization.
