Supercomputer IBM Watson will become a separate division of the corporation with a budget of $ 1 billion

Most recently, an article was published on Habr that IBM opens the IBM Watson supercomputer tools for third-party developers. Now the company has gone further and allocated IBM Watson in its own division, with an additional investment.

Of course, this refers not only to the supercomputer itself, but also to the team of its developers, maintenance personnel and all others. The company decided to allocate $ 1 billion for the development of such a unit, of which a tenth, $ 100 million, will be used to create an “ecosystem” of applications and services for IBM Watson.

Actually, these 100 million are allocated for the formation of a venture capital fund, which allocates investments to start-ups and companies that will develop applications / services for the supercomputer. The corporation does all this for a reason, and with an eye on the forecast of the research company Gartner. According to the company, in the near future, “smart” machines will become a key factor in the breakthrough in information technology, helping people to “do the impossible” and work more efficiently.



About the seriousness of intentions IBM says not only the amount of 1 billion dollars, but also the planned number of employees of the new department in 2000 people. Employees will include both IBM direct employees and industry experts to help evaluate specific areas of work, including healthcare, financial services, retail, tourism, and telecommunications.

The new division will be called: IBM Watson Group. The unit will be headed by Michael Rhodin, Senior Vice President, IBM Software Solutions Group.



Among other things, the task of the IBM Watson Group will be to support and develop three new services.

1. IBM Watson Discovery Advisor . This area is primarily aimed at supporting pharmaceutical research. The service will help companies developing new pharmaceuticals to analyze large amounts of research data with the establishment of logical connections. Probably, all this will help to conduct research in this area much faster.

2. IBM Watson Analytics. The second direction is the visualization of large data arrays. The service will help companies process data arrays much faster than in the usual case. The supercomputer will establish logical connections between the analyzed data arrays, presenting the result in a simple visual form.

3. IBM Watson Explorer . The service offers common standards in the development of information-oriented applications that provide a comprehensive context-sensitive overview of any topic relevant to business users and data processing specialists.

Actually, all this will be tied around a business incubator, in which, according to the plan, technologies, development tools and human resources will appear to create and launch new solutions based on the Watson cognitive system in the cloud.



For participants in the project division Watson Group will conduct trainings, seminars, workshops, to be attended by scientists, businessmen, politicians , IT professionals. The scale of such meetings is great - according to plan, it is planned to attract more than 1000 academic organizations to participate in them.

It is also worth recalling that the IBM Watson Developers Cloud project continues to work and develop, now within the framework of the new division. As before, an application should be submitted to participate in the project., which will then be considered by the "jury" of the project ..

Now all these projects are only at the beginning of the path, and each participant, both the company and the developer or scientist, is valuable for their development. So everyone who is interested in working with IBM Watson and its expanding "ecosystem" is invited to cooperate.