Former The Weather Company CEO and new IBM Watson chief David Kenny has plans to build Watson into... [+]
Forget Bob Dylan and Serena Williams:
When IBM announced the close of its acquisition of The Weather Company on Friday, it added another veteran CEO in Weather's David Kenny to work under Big Blue boss Ginni Rometty. And IBM's not wasting Kenny's time on integrating his former company into the fold. So hours after the the announcement, the newly-appointed chief of the critical IBM Watson unit shared his top priority: to bring Watson together into a more cohesive product that will introduce "artificial intelligence as a service."
Kenny didn't expect to spend a chapter of his career at IBM, he says, just as he didn't expect to see the $119 billion (market cap) company move so aggressively for the non-TV units of Weather, where he was chairman and CEO. "I'm surprised," he says, but "I'm having a great day." The acquisition of Weather, reported in October to be expected to cost more than $2 billion, was done to boost IBM in the Internet of Things, Kenny says. Last March, IBM announced a $3 billion commitment to such Internet-connected sensors and devices, particularly in weather. The Weather Company had made a priority to connect hundreds of millions of sensors to produce more than 20 terabytes of data a day for its apps and websites.
That expertise will now go into IBM's other Internet of Things units, scanning information from medical equipment, smartphones as well as trains, planes and automobiles. The weather.com brand will enter new markets in China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Japan. But that will be a job for Kenny's former president at Weather, Cameron Clayton, now part of IBM's data and analytics unit. Kenny's focus is on Watson the platform.
IBM has declared its intentions for Watson to be a $10 billion business in the next decade. In past months it launched a freemium analytics tool to use some of Watson's capabilities and research labs centered around a new global unit headquarters in Munich announced in December. But while IBM claimed adjusted 26% growth for its so-called "strategic imperatives," of cloud, mobile, security and analytics for 2015, Watson still has a long way to go to make revenue that can drive the entire company.
Offering "artificial intelligence as a service," as Kenny describes his mission, could be the key next step. Watson already solves "deep problems," Kenny says, in areas including law, healthcare and financial risk. But those clients can't always share their stories, he admits, and IBM could do a better job unifying the various Watson capabilities into one coherent product. Make those offerings more repeatable and easier to plug-and-play and get running almost immediately with a customer big or small, and Watson could democratize machine learning in a way that other AI companies can't offer at the same scale, Kenny says.
IBM has competition in the machine learning and AI space (
As for working at a company as old and large as IBM, and one with well-documented problems as it undergoes a multi-year transition to new areas of business, Kenny says he's reassured by the 500 companies already trying out Watson and the ecosystem that's already started to form. "That's new to IBM, and Watson cracked that code," he says.
"Platforms" are a buzzword among software companies now, with each product-maker fancying itself a hub for other companies to build upon and share their other data sources with, from
"The Watson brand is attracting some extraordinary minds from other companies, and the top thinkers in IBM are working on this project," Kenny says. "This is becoming a magnet for great talent. And as these products become ready over the next year or two, people will see more of that."
