IBM has announced the launching of the new global headquarters its Watson Internet of things (IoT) business unit in Munich, Germany.
Watson will help IBM clients shuffle through reams of data expected to be generated by the masses of connected objects coming online as part of the Internet of things. Watson’s skills will be made available as part of the services offered to customers who come in through IBM’s IoT Foundation cloud product.
The Watson IoT unit will feature 1,000 developers, consultants and researchers to work. The headquarters will also be a test bed for data scientists, programmers and engineers, according to Information Week. Target markets include auto, electronics, healthcare, manufacturers and insurance.
Additionally, IBM will include 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. APIs are machine learning and image analytics. IBM will focus on how customers can actually make money from the insights they gain from data.
A natural language processing API would enable an app to handle the spoken word as an input, relying on Watson to handle the query, comb various data sources for information that correlates with the query, and provide a recommendation. It would help to classify the data in order of importance for status updates.
Watson’s video and image analytics will help to resolve how a past event provides context for a current problem. Security camera footage can become a data source, logging accidents that can indirectly impact a current system.
The American computer hardware company will also open new Watson IoT experience centers in Beijing, China; Boeblingen, Germany; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Seoul, Korea; Tokyo, Japan; and Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Texas. These centers are designed to highlight IBM's portfolio and show industry-specific applications, ZDNet reported.