by Ottawa Business Daily
Instead of losing its breath trying to keep up with the top three leaders in the cloud race, IBM is now taking a more flexible approach offering Watson Anywhere, analysts say.
On Feb. 12, IBM announced Watson Anywhere, which allows people to use the company’s Watson artificial intelligence on any cloud they want, whether it’s a public cloud, a private cloud, or hybrid cloud — a combination of cloud and data centers.
Watson Anywhere is optimized for IBM’s cloud, but the fact that it can also run on any other cloud is a sign that IBM is looking to capitalize on important market trends, such as customers who want to use multiple clouds, says Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.
“IBM is saying, we’re not going to compete with the usual suspects,” Nag told Business Insider. “We’re doing one better where we’re going to take our technologies and overlay that not just on IBM cloud, but also the other cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Azure and others. That’s their strategy creating more velocity around IBM cloud ecosystem.”
Since analysts say it’s unlikely that IBM’s cloud will reach the scale of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft or Google anytime soon, they see it as an effective strategy that shows IBM is responding to what customers need.
A “very good step”
John Roy, lead analyst at UBS, says allowing customers to use Watson wherever they want is a “wise decision.” Otherwise, if IBM kept requiring people to use Watson on IBM’s cloud, it would not be sustainable.
“Watson Anywhere is certainly a very good step,” Roy told Business Insider. “I think making it available in whatever platform the end user wants to use it on is a very good strategy…You want your core software products used in as many places as possible.”
An AI service like Watson that only works on IBM’s cloud would be a useful strategy if IBM’s cloud had reached sufficient scale, like Amazon or Microsoft‘s clouds. Currently, AWS and Microsoft Azure offer services that work exclusively on their clouds.
