When the world’s greatest minds share the same workspace, the result is a massive explosion of creativity and invention.
That’s the case for IBM, a tech giant whose Watson supercomputer is now the world champion at analyzing data to solve problems.
Its Watson artificial intelligence is already being used in the field of health care to identify diseases, and it’s already being deployed to tackle some of the worlds biggest problems: climate change and artificial intelligence.
But IBM isn’t just using Watson for those purposes.
It’s also using it to do what other tech giants don’t: see what’s happening in the rest of the office, so it can respond to new challenges in an efficient way.
And now, Watson is being used to do just that, thanks to a collaboration between IBM and Microsoft, a company that owns the cloud computing platform Azure.
The collaboration started in June, with Microsoft’s Azure Research Lab (ARL) partnering with IBM to develop the Watson Watson supercomputing platform.
Now, Microsoft is using the collaboration to build a cloud computing system called Azure Watson.
The new system can run Watson on top of Azure, a service that provides computing power for many of the things that the supercomputers of old couldn’t handle.
“We’re going to be able to run IBM Watson and Microsoft Watson together in a completely new way,” said Paul Thurston, vice president of Microsoft’s cloud computing group, at a keynote session in December.
The two companies are working on building out a new suite of tools that will allow them to share data and analytics between each other and with other supercomputers.
This will allow for faster and more accurate processing of data, and also make it easier for companies to build new applications.
That includes cloud computing that can run on the cloud and use Azure as a base.
That means that a company can create new apps and services on the fly and then quickly deploy them on a cloud service, like Azure.
So, for example, a small business could run an analytics tool for its employees and then deploy it to Azure, and all of a sudden, its analytics team will have access to all of the data that it has collected about those employees.
IBM Watson’s supercomputer isn’t the only system it’s collaborating with on Azure.
Microsoft has also teamed up with the University of Cambridge to build an Azure computing platform called Azure Machine Learning.
This machine learning platform will allow other companies to create cloud computing applications, and Azure Machine learning will allow IBM Watson to run the new Watson superintelligence on Azure, helping to build out Azure’s new platform.
IBM says that it will be working with Azure to build software that will help the supercomputer become more efficient, more powerful, and better at running big data analysis tasks.
Microsoft says that this is just the start of its collaboration with Azure.
“There are many ways that we can work together on the future of computing,” Thurston said.
“The collaboration between Microsoft and IBM will give us an unprecedented opportunity to use the most advanced and powerful supercomparison and machine learning technology to improve our enterprise cloud and accelerate the growth of the Internet of Things.”
For now, IBM is working on Azure Watson to make sure that it is able to scale and keep up with demand, and the company is aiming to be using the system on as many as 1 billion machines.
