IBM Announces Global Headquarters for IoT in Germany

According to the Vice President of Watson IoT, Bret Greenstein, the headquarters of the unit are in Munich since, “The leading thinking about commercial IoT started in Germany”.

New Watson IoT Services Accelerate Cognitive IoT IBM is bringing the power of cognitive analytics to the IoT by making four families of Watson API services available as part of a new IBM Watson IoT Analytics offering.

Commerce Insights with Watson helps users contextualize data and make decisions using an API, similar to BeyondCore, a software system that links to Microsoft Office.

The headquarters is a considerable statement of intent by the company with 67,000 sq ft of office space in the multi-storey Highlight Towers skyscraper, and is IBM’s largest investment in Europe in more than two decades.

The opening of the campus comes after IBM announced plans to extend its Watson platform to offer developers a new set of cognitive APIs, technologies and artificial intelligence tools through the Watson Developer Cloud.

Postlethwaite says the Client Experience Centers will leverage IBM Watson, IoT and Analytics products and technologies to build client solutions that are transformative in creating new business models that deliver new ways to engage customers and product revenues.

IBM customers in sectors ranging from automotive, electronics, healthcare, insurance and industrial manufacturers will have direct access to the open, cloud-based platform to develop and create the next generation of cognitive IoT apps, something that IBM has dubbed “Industry 4.0 innovation”. As the physical world of devices and systems are becoming highly digitized, these capabilities will allow clients, partners and developers to make greater sense of this data through machine learning and correlation with unstructured data. The centers will be opened in Boeblingen, Sao Paulo, Beijing, Texas, Massachusetts, Tokyo, Seoul and North Carolina.

Video and Image Analytics Watson API: this API performs a quick and effective analysis of unorganized data (which includes messages from media files) to establish patterns.

Machine learning API: this API is capable of prioritizing data after learning patterns from the continuous interaction with data from devices.

The APIs were first revealed in September and new ones for the IoT were announced today.

IBMs pioneering work in Smarter Planet drove practical applications of IoT in the enterprise.