IBM Watson

IBM announced it will be selling its healthcare data and analytics business, currently a key part of Watson Health, to investment firm Francisco Partners. The assets acquired by Francisco Partners include extensive and diverse data sets and products, including Health Insights, MarketScan, Clinical Development, Social Program Management, Micromedex, and imaging software.

IBM artificial intelligence partner Spacetime released a new “plug and play” avatar-based virtual assistant (chatbot). Powered by IBM Watson artificial intelligence the solution allows customers to select an avatar of their choice, ranging from simple animated cartoon characters right through to hyper-realistic digital humans. The company says avatars make chatbots far more engaging and helps companies represent their brand to customers better.

IBM announced the acquisition of Turbonomic, an Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) software provider based in Boston, MA. The acquisition give IBM a full stack application observability and management to assure performance and minimize costs using AI to optimize resources – such as containers, VMs, servers, storage, networks, and databases.

The IBM Watson Center Munich had it’s Grand Opening on 16 Feb 2017 in the Munich’s Highlight Towers. On the 23rd floor, IBM has impressive showcases with real moving robots and IoT devices. Our German correspondent Dr. Harald Karcher visited the robots several times from 2017 to 2020. He provides an exclusive insight in this center of robotic innovation for RockingRobots.