Last October, IBM announced that it had reached an agreement to purchase the Weather Company.
While the financial terms of the agreement remain undisclosed, the acquisition became official Friday, as reported by Tech Crunch and confirmed by IBM.
With the deal, IBM acquires the Weather Company's mobile and cloud-based digital platforms, including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and the Weather Company brand.
That being said, the Weather Channel television component doesn't become an IBM acquisition, as it will license weather data and analytics from IBM instead.
More than anything, though, this deal going through boosts IBM's Watson Artificial Intelligence, bolstering its muscle in the Internet of Things (IoT) space. To delve deeper into that, Tech Crunch reports that IBM described the explosion of impending weather data under the acquisition to cover billions of IoT sensors.
Back in October, when the initial agreement was struck, IBM Solutions Portfolio and Research senior vice president John Kelly spoke of the ramifications of the deal to the company's IoT.
"The Weather Company's extremely high-volume data platform, coupled with IBM's global cloud and the advanced cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, will be unsurpassed in the Internet of Things, providing our clients significant competitive advantage as they link their business and sensor data with weather and other pertinent information in real time," Kelly said at the time during a company press release. "This powerful cloud platform will position IBM to arm entire industries with deep multimodal insights that will help enterprises gain clarity and take action from the oceans of data being generated around them."
Tech Crunch additionally reports that IBM will ramp up weather.com into five new markets, including three huge ones in China, Brazil and India "immediately," in addition to folding it into IBM's 45 global cloud centers.
Overall, this deal falls under IBM's pledge to invest $3 billion in the IoT space.
