The cloud for clouds: IBM and The Weather Company work on big data weather forecasts

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Colin Barker.

IBM and The Weather Company want to use big data, the cloud, and the Internet of Things to improve weather forecasting for businesses. As part of a new deal between the companies, The Weather Company will shift its massive weather data services platform to the IBM Cloud and integrate its data with IBM analytics and cloud services.

The deal reflects how competition in the cloud market is heating up too: The Weather Company is a close partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Bryson Koehler, the CIO/CTO for The Weather Company, told ZDNet: "I believe in the multi-cloud story and believe that any serious cloud-based business or application needs to be built in a cloud-agnostic way."…

The Weather Company, he said, "has been on that journey for the last three years and that’s what has enabled us to deploy our Data Services Platform onto IBM SoftLayer so we can power our business and strategic opportunities with IBM beyond what we could do with AWS alone". As IBM points out, weather is the single largest external variable in business performance – responsible for "an annual economic impact of nearly half a trillion dollars in the US alone"…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-cloud-for-clouds-ibm-and-the-weather-company-work-on-big-data-weather-forecasts/