IBM has recently made big purchases of weather companies, including Weather.com, an underground weather news website and its vast weather database, and has since announced plans to further expand its scale to five major markets, including China, Japan, India, Brazil and Mexico, with the goal of adding hundreds of millions of global users in the next three years.
What is the purpose of IBM spending billions of dollars to buy the weather company? The answer is to see the potential value of the industrialization of meteorological information.
The great potential of meteorological information industrialization lies in the fact that it can involve a number of meteorology-related industries, such as agriculture and fishery, catering, insurance, air and maritime transportation, tourism, public works, and so on. Weather can have a profound impact on the sales situation, inventory, and promotion planning in these industries.
Because they are highly dependent on weather forecasting, theoretically, the faster and more accurate data they get, the better they can get a starting point and help companies make better business strategies.
IBM now owns weather data and related data screening technology instead of leasing them, which means that IBM can continue to work with a variety of weather-related industries to make a bigger profit by selling the company’s weather data and forecasting services.
In the trucking industry, for example, the industry can buy real-time weather data from IBM to receive information about a storm in a certain place, and can alert drivers to stay away from that expected route, thereby maintaining or even strengthening the company’s competitive advantage.
It’s not hard to imagine that IBM can bring great economic benefits to the weather information it has, as long as it makes good use of the weather information at hand. What’s more, IBM has invested nearly 100 times more in weather data than other big data competitors such as Google, making it an industry pioneer in this area, which means that IBM will be more easily invincible in the days to come. In the coming days, it will be interesting to see how IBM will develop its meteorological data industry.
