IBM, generally known as “Big Blue”, has sealed a deal with “The Weather Company”, the parent body of The Weather Channel. Formerly an Amazon cloud customer, The Weather Channel is a cable and satellite television channel providing a wide range of online and television weather forecast services. It has headquarters in Cumberland, Georgia, USA.
The Weather Company’s entire online presence will shift to IBM’s cloud infrastructure.
The deal comes in the wake of IBM’s recent success with Twitter. Both deals focus on IBM’s “Watson Analytics” Big Data capability. IBM will help companies “extract actionable business insights” from Twitter data, while the importance of Big Data to an organization that predicts weather patterns is obvious. Correct weather prediction would, for instance, enable industry to plan for natural disaster, potentially saving billions of dollars in lost operations. To determine the scale of The Weather Company’s Big Data needs, you need to look at the data it collects – the company manages around 2 billion sensors globally that generate over 25 billion weather forecasts a day.
"There's an opportunity to inform all business operations and decision-making with real-time actionable insight delivered securely via the cloud and extracted from all this data collected from sensors all over the planet," explained IBM Analytics’s Senior Vice President Bob Picciano in a press release. "The Weather Company and IBM partnership can be a catalyst to making critical business systems even smarter."
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