How IBM’s Acquisition of The Weather Company Is Changing The Climate of IoT

During the initial commercial era of the web, portals, telcos and aggregators were frenzied acquirers of content companies in order to drive the magical “eyeballs” valued by investors. Turn the clock forward 15-20 years and in these early days of the Internet of Things (IoT) there is a new frenzy to source actionable data sets. The announcement that IBM is acquiring The Weather Company’s product and technology business is a sign of how important weather data is across the IBM solution set for mobility, IoT, analytics and Watson. 

Weather is obviously everywhere and in this compelling acquisition, IBM is securing access to 127,000 global sensor stations, 3 Billion forecast reference points and 40 million unique mobile monthly viewers of data that is relevant to every industry operating today. This is one of the fundamental data sets around which new services and insights can be developed to give IBM a differentiated solution positioning in the world of IoT and analytics based services. For example, this new data can be integrated with IoT sensor data from connected vehicles, connected buildings as well as physical and digital supply chains to change the way that industries respond to the opportunities and the challenges created by evolving weather conditions around the globe.

IBM was in the “Winner’s Circle” of our recent HfS Blueprint on IoT Services in part because of its strong portfolio of IoT tools and platforms as well as end-to-end capabilities in related managed services. The acquisition of both the data and platforms of The Weather Company furthers that position.

Success for service providers in IoT related solutions will come in part from mastering several fronts over the next few years—all which are evident in this IBM acquisition:

• Insight value will come from monitoring activities (e.g., in the home, automobile, building, and city)
• Creating data lakes and stitching together APIs will drive integration while analytics becomes an area of competitive differentiation
• Partnering will be critical because service providers will establish IoT leadership by exhibiting skill in managing complexity (internally and externally) to create solutions that span data, sensors, platforms, analytics and business insights

By moving quickly to consolidate what was still a recent partnership (Spring 2015) into a full fledged acquisition, IBM is pushing far forward the strategic thinking around what it means to be a service provider in IoT services and what data access will be critical to the creation of new uses cases and solutions. We believe that this acquisition really does change the climate for IoT adoption and integration into real world activities today and in doing so, IBM is helping change the climate for IoT adoption into 2016 and beyond.