IBM Buying Various IoT Weather Co. Properties, but not Weather Channel

IBM is buying various Weather Co. properties, but not the Weather Channel, to help be the foundation for its Watson IoT Unit and Watson IoT Cloud platform, IBM said in a news release Wednesday. Financial terms of the deal -- which would see IBM picking up WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and the Weather Co. brand, as well as its meteorological data science experts, forecasting capabilities and a high-volume cloud-based analytics platform and is expected to close in Q1 -- weren't disclosed. Weather Channel will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM, the company said. Weather Co. CEO David Kenny said the company "see[s] the next wave of improved forecasting coming from the intersection of atmospheric science, computer science and analytics." IBM and Weather Co. jointly began integrating real-time weather analytics into business earlier this year through a variety of data services packages and application programming interfaces, and Weather Co. announced plans to move its weather data services platform behind its business-to-business division to the IBM cloud, IBM said.