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Customers of AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or even their own on premise solution can now call on IBM’s Watson. With this surprising move, IBM hopes to get Watson to more customers.

IBM brings Watson to other public clouds and even private cloud environments. Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Data and AI, announced this himself at IBM’s annual Think conference in San Francisco.

In this way, IBM wants to meet reality: other cloud players are bigger, and customers are not going to move with their entire cloud infrastructure to IBM to try out Watson. From now on, it will be possible to analyse data stored on AWS, Microsoft Azure or the Google Cloud with Watson. The AI solution can also work with data on private cloud servers.

AI specialist

With Watson, you can analyze data, gain insights, develop AI solutions and build things like smart chatbots. Watson has been a big name in the AI industry for years, but the powerful service didn’t seem able to deliver more cloud market share to IBM on its own. Watson’s best-known applications may be found in the healthcare sector these days.

IBM uses Kubernetes to link Watson to the data in other cloud environments. Google previously used Kubernetes to roll out Kubeflow Pipelines, and Intel launched the Nauta-deep learning platform via the orchestration software.

Availability

IBM has not yet communicated concrete availability and a corresponding price. It is therefore not clear whether Watson will immediately be available to customers of other cloud providers worldwide. Moreover, Watson only comes to public cloud providers from North America. The Chinese Baidu or Alibaba don’t get the functionality. On Premises data centres are supported, as mentioned above.

Related: IBM: We teach AI Assistant Watson everything about cyber security

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.