IBM to buy the Weather Company

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the deal includes essentially all of the Weather Companys assets other than the Weather Channel television station, including Weather.com, the Weather Channel mobile apps, the Weather Underground website and, perhaps most importantly, Weather Services global, a division that sells weather data to companies such as airlines and the insurance industry.

The Weather Company and IBM may seem like an odd pairing at first, but IBM already has a partnership with the Weather Company to jointly sell its weather data services and incorporate that data into its cloud-based (no pun intended) Watson services.

The Weather Co.’s private equity owners – Bain Capital and Blackstone Group – had been shopping the company’s assets for a few time. The Weather Channel has struggled in recent years to find the right mix of forecasts, weather commentary, and more entertainment-focused reality programming. It’s unclear what effects, if any, the acquisition will have on the app in the near-term, but with the Weather Company’s meteorological data and Watson’s smarts behind it, the sky’s the limit.

Much of the Weather Co.’s data is managed on the computing systems of IBM competitors, including Amazon and Google, as well as on the IBM cloud-computing system SoftLayer.

“Apache Spark is an open-source cluster computing framework with in-memory processing to speed analytic applications up to 100 times faster compared to technologies on the market today”, says the Web site for the new analytics service. At the time, almost 90% of the value of the business was the TV network, according to a knowledgeable person.

Perhaps the biggest change in the revamped Weather Channel app is an option to go ad-free for $3.99 a year. In 2013, the TV channel also had a public fight with DirecTV regarding carriage fees, and Verizon FiOS dropped the channel earlier in 2015. Agriculture companies rely on weather information to maximize their crop yields. About 950 are expected to move to IBM while 400 will stay on to run the television channel.

“We see the next wave of improved forecasting coming from the intersection of atmospheric science, computer science, and analytics”, said David Kenny, chairman and CEO of The Weather Company.

IBM plans to expand the capabilities to industries beyond weather “in a matter of months and quarters”, Kelly said.