IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has big plans for IoT in Europe. (Credit: Feature Photo Service/IBM)
As U.S. tech giants race to manage the data from an influx of Internet connected devices, IBM's new IoT headquarters in Germany could help separate it from the pack.
IBM announced the launch of a new global headquarters for its Watson IoT business unit in Munich on Tuesday, in what the company says is its largest commitment to Europe in more than twenty years. The new facility, which will feature more than 1,000 employees on the research and customer-facing sides, will be the centerpiece of a group of eight global regional customer centers that suggest IBM plans to win major IoT business by deemphasizing its American roots.
IBM's "client experience centers" will be based in Beijing, Boeblingen (Germany), Sao Paulo, Seoul, Tokyo as well as Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas in the U.S. While three American regional centers indicates a commitment to growing the business stateside (and the big swaths of territory involved), placing the headquarters in Germany is a deeply symbolic move, says analyst Frank Gillett of Forrester Research. With European companies, especially major ones in Germany, the continent's largest economy, concerned about American tech companies exporting the value from the rise of Internet-connected sensors in their businesses, IBM's base in Munich will be intended to demonstrate that the company can be trusted, the analyst says. "A traditional mainline tech company has plunked down in Europe to say, we are firmly with you, we are rooting ourselves in your environment to work with you."
That message could prove effective with big industrial companies and those with high security concerns, exactly the type of enterprise-class customers that IBM has historically depended upon and would be eager to win back with Watson IoT.
In addition to the new business centers, IBM also announced additional APIs for its IoT practice, connectors that can be plugged into a company's own technology to bring it Watson IoT insights without ever transferring its data outside its walls. Those APIs, in ares such as machine learning and image analytics, are focused on what IBM is calling "cognitive computing." Put more simply, IBM's focusing on how customers can actually make money from the insights they gain from data.
IBM did not immediately respond to questions regarding its announcements; in its release, general manager Harriet Green said in a statement that "almost 90 percent of [IoT] data is never acted upon. With its unique abilities to sense, reason and learn, Watson opens the door for 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."
Gillett, the Forrester analyst, notes that some of that 90% of unconsidered data is left untouched for good reason. "There's a lot of work to find a needle in that haystack," he says. Make it cheaper to try, however, and companies might find it worth going through more of the data they already collect. That could be industrials like
Putting it all under the Watson name could reinforce IBM's message that the Internet of Things is about how it ties into real business analytics. But as IBM has used Watson in branding plenty in the past, there's an element of marketing to the name, too. And Gillett, who's been tracking all the big vendors' IoT announcements in recent months, says that Amazon Web Services' own offering announced in October still provided more detail on its IoT products than IBM has.
"IBM still needs to put more specifics on the board," says Gillett. "But they've now signaled the most strongly of any of the vendors when it comes to investment and organizational structure and headquarters. Now they have to execute and deliver."
