IBM Watson CTO: ‘Data is the lifeblood of every business’

Author: John Kennedy / Source: Silicon Republic

For our five-minute CIO series, we spoke to IBM’s Bryson Koehler about the future of data in business.

Bryson Koehler is CTO of IBM Watson and IBM Cloud, as well as general manager and distinguished engineer for IBM.

As CTO, Koehler leads the architectural charge to bring together the cognitive and AI computing capabilities of IBM Watson Machine Learning, a cloud-native, infrastructure-as-a-service architecture; data and analytics, the IBM Watson Data Platform; IBM Cloud Video; and The Weather Company.

‘A third of the world’s GDP is impacted by weather every single day’
^{– BRYSON KOEHLER}

Before joining IBM, Koehler served as CTO for The Weather Company, where he led the company’s transformation by building one of the world’s largest IoT/data platforms — this was an integral factor in IBM’s decision to acquire the company.

He has also served as operating partner with Exigen Capital, senior vice-president of Global Revenue, and guest technology for InterContinental Hotels Group, and has also led teams at Vicorp, USWeb and Arthur Andersen Business Consulting.

Tell me about The Weather Company’s work that made it of interest to IBM?

The Weather Channel was a media business and it had been in business for 20 to 30 years, and we knew we needed to change. And so, the journey to become The Weather Company was the journey about becoming a big data software business, and helping use technology to provide insights to people and businesses to help them make smarter decisions.

If you think about your own life, the weather drives a lot of your decision-making. Am I going to walk to lunch, am I going to have to take a taxi, will I eat outside, what will I do this weekend?

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