IBM opens up Watson to run on anything, anywhere

IBM today announced that it will be opening up Watson to enable wide-scale deployment and industry transformation. Big Blue has made Watson portable across any cloud with the goal to empower businesses to prevent vendor lock-in and start deploying AI wherever their data resides. "Businesses have largely been limited to experimenting with AI in siloes due to the limitations caused by cloud provider lock-in of their data," says IBM Data and AI general manager Rob Thomas. "With most large organisations storing data across hybrid cloud environments, they need the freedom and choice to apply AI to their data wherever it is stored. By breaking open that siloed infrastructure we can help businesses accelerate their transformation through AI." IBM asserts Watson is designed to help organisations put AI to work to improve the performance of business, with a clear set of applications, development tools, machine learning models, and management services it can help in mining data, predicting outcomes, and automating time- and resource-sensitive processes.