Einstein and Watson Put Heads Together
March 13 2017
IBM and Salesforce have entered a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions using artificial intelligence. A new practice within IBM Global Business Services will help clients rapidly deploy tools combining IBM Watson's big data with Salesforce Einstein's customer insights.
Watson's analysis of data including weather, healthcare, financial services and retail will be fed directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, with the aim of accelerating decision-making and 'driving greater customer success'.
While the main integration will enable 'smarter, faster decisions across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more', the partnership will also develop:
- IBM Weather Insights for Salesforce: The Weather Company, an IBM business, will power a new Lightning component on the Salesforce AppExchange to provide weather insights that inform customer interactions and business performance; and
- IBM Application Integration Suite for Salesforce: enabling customers to combine their own enterprise and cloud data with specialized integration products for Salesforce, outputting directly within the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform.
The new practice will be formed within Bluewolf, a company IBM acquired just under a year ago for a reported $200m. Bluewolf Dedicated Consulting Services and Expertise for Cognitive Solutions will tap Bluewolf's fifteen plus years of Salesforce implementations, and will also develop new industry-specific accelerators for the adoption of cognitive applications.
The integration is expected to be available in the second half of 2017.
Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President and CEO of IBM, comments: 'This year we expect Watson will touch one billion people - through everything from oncology and retail to tax preparation and cars. Now, with today's announcement, the power of Watson will serve the millions of Salesforce and Einstein customers and developers to provide an unprecedented understanding of customers'. Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, adds: 'The combination of Einstein and Watson will make businesses smarter and our customers more successful. I'm thrilled to form an alliance with IBM - no company's core values are as close to Salesforce's as IBM's. It's the best of both worlds'.
Web sites:
www.ibm.com/watson and
www.salesforce.com .
Separately, Google has confirmed its acquisition of Kaggle, a community platform consisting of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts, whose team will boost its capabilities in machine learning training and deployment services, dataset storage and query technologies. Kaggle was founded in 2010 and has reportedly been used by more than 800,000 data scientists.
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
