IBM execs tout Watson-as-a-Service, venture funding to tech startups in California.

Lance Crosby, CEO of IBM’s cloud unit SoftLayer is traveling up and down the Silicon Valley meeting with startups. But his mission isn’t to get them to show to IBM for cloud services, although startups typically show a robust affinity for using cloud infrastructure.

Rather, he’s busy introducing IBM’s 14-year-old venture capital unit, which has $100 million to speculate in firms that see new business opportunities from IBM’s Watson analytics system. SoftLayer is now offering Watson-as-a-Service out of 3 of its cloud centers — Dallas, London, and Hong Kong  — Crosby said during a trip to InformationWeek offices Wednesday March 5.

“We moved the Watson Group to Manhattan’s Silicon Ally, its tech hub,” noted Crosby. That puts 2,000 Watson developers, maintainers, product managers, and marketers next to at least one of the best concentrations of startups at the East Coast. IBM has previously partnered with John Hopkins University to explore what Watson can do when exposed to masses of medical data. One result, said Crosby, was Watson became more skilled at predicting impending cases of cancer from information in patient healthcare records than docs were.

Although Watson is in only three SoftLayer data centers in the present day, the large data analytics system is slated to be in all 40 by the tip of the year. SoftLayer had 13 data centers when it was acquired by IBM last year; it added IBM’s 12 cloud centers to its lineup and is busy adding 15 more. Application developers may connect with it through its public-facing cloud API, Crosby said. Portion of his pitch is to encourage developers to be told to take advantage of that API.

[Desire to learn more about one of many first companies to utilize Watson? See Watson Gets App Partner; Meet Welltok.]

The face of IBM Venture Capital Group is Claudia Fan Munce, managing director and VP of corporate strategy, and it’s her job to locate the young firms that know the way Watson is really a business opportunity for them.

“Watson is healthier as a service when there’s learning taking place in Watson itself,” she noted. That’s a brand new concept to get across to the young business thinkers and technologists inside startups. It isn’t only the quantity of knowledge which you bring to Watson that counts. It is the outcomes from using the information, as in doctor and patient healthcare records, that let Watson to benefit and supply data insights.

Munce thinks there are still many undiscovered uses for the large data analytics system. For firms with 1000’s or millions of shoppers, Watson could aggregate a variety of types of unstructured data, isolate the patterns present in each customer’s data, and start checking out customer groupings in ways a human eye gazing the identical data would find difficult to do.

Among IBM’s large companies, the continued demand is for better management of shopper data, reams and reams of it. If Munce can convince more Silicon Valley startups with such aims and initiatives to apply Watson, Watson’s future will be assured.

By investing in promising companies that use Watson, IBM Venture Capital Group is hand-feeding the beginning of an ecosystem of young companies that grow up skilled within the use of its big analytics system. If that becomes the spark plug of an extended-term marketplace for Watson-as-a-Service, than the $100 million investment could have met its goals.

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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