IBM and Cisco Systems are teaming up to combine their products in a cloud collaboration. They include IBM's email platform and Cisco's messaging app. The companies hope in the future IBM's Watson supercomputer will serve as a virtual coworker by using artificial intelligence (AI) to do mundane tasks such as scheduling meetings.
The computer and networking giants will combine their different products in the cloud. They include IBM's Verse email platform, as well as Cisco's WebEx conferencing service and Spark messaging app.
IBM and Cisco will demo examples of the merged products next month at the Cisco Live conference, according to Computerworld.
The cloud collaboration could mainly help Apple users. Both tech companies have partnerships with Apple for business applications and communications on its devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
Cisco and IBM hope their products can first detect each other and then work together. For example, if an employee uses Verse e-mail to set up a WebEx meeting, they could launch the meeting using one click rather than four. The participants could also automatically get information about what was talked about during the last WebEx meeting.
Ross Daniels is senior director of collaboration marketing at Cisco. He explained that merging IBM and Cisco products will help to keep employees in their work-flow.
The two companies hope to add Watson Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to the cloud collaboration. It will allow AI to do new automated tasks.
A key to Watson's work is figuring out which tasks are most important. For example, the supercomputer could analyze recent conversations with co-workers to learn that a new meeting about the subject is more important than weekly office meetings.
If there is an emergency situation, Watson would automatically cancel the weekly meeting. However, users could still reverse its decision.
In related news, IBM is donating Watson computers to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. The super-fast computing machines will analyze the genomes of 10,000 cancer patients, according to Forbes.
The gift was announced on June 29, Wednesday. It was before a summit held by Vice President Joe Biden and is part of the US government's Cancer Moonshot program. The Veterans Administration (VA) treats 3.5 percent of US cancer patients.
Here's a video on IBM's Watson: