IBM Closes On The Weather Company

IBM Friday announced that it has closed the acquisition of The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web properties, weather.com, Weather Underground, The Weather Company brand and WSI, its global business-to-business brand.

The cable TV segment was not acquired by IBM, but will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract.

The combination of technology and expertise from the two companies will serve as the foundation for the Watson IoT Cloud platform, building on a $3B commitment IBM made in March 2015 to invest in the Internet of Things. The deal broadly extends the scale and capability of IBM’s cloud data services platform and expands The Weather Company’s enterprise services capabilities and consumer reach to a global scale, including plans to bring weather.com to new major markets such as China and India.

Dave Shull

“The Weather Company’s extremely high-volume data platform, coupled with IBM Cloud and the advanced cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, is unsurpassed in the Internet of Things,” said John E. Kelly, IBM’s senior vice president, cognitive solutions and research. “This rich platform provides our clients significant competitive advantage as they link their business and sensor data with weather and other pertinent information in real-time. We can arm entire industries with deep multimodal insights to help enterprises gain clarity and take action on the oceans of data being generated around them.”

Dave Shull will be CEO of The Weather Channel Television Network. Before the deal, Shull’s title was Group President, TV. He joined The Weather Channel in May of last year after previously being at Dish Network.

On the IBM side, David Kenny, who was chairman and CEO of The Weather Company, assumes leadership of the IBM Watson platform business – while The Weather Company, which will be led by Cameron Clayton, becomes part of IBM’s Data and Analytics Platform business unit.