IBM is introducing Watson to the big data world. The supercomputer includes a lot of components developed by the company – and some of which have been proved to be quite useful for IBM customers in the medical industry looking to extract value from their data.

The latest step IBM has taken is introducing its Strategic Intellectual Property Insight Platform, a cloud-based service developed in collaboration with AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer. The solution leverages Watson-based data mining, natural-language processing and analytics among other things to automate medical research on a massive scale, the New York Times reported.

“It searches for the names of compounds, related words, drawings of the compounds, the names of companies working with specific chemicals and molecules, and the names of scientists who created the patented inventions. It does its work quickly, retrieving information on patents in as little as 24 hours after a filing.”

As an early demonstration of its product, IBM contributed 2.4 million chemical compounds-worth of data to the  National Institutes of Health; an extract from a combination of 4.7 million patents and more than twice as much biomedical papers.

While IBM is increasing the RoI on its Jeopardy! champion, it’s also trying to clear some legal accusations by the EU against Watson’s distant cousins. Citing two different sources “familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg reports that the European Union will accept an offer by the company next week to settle a dispute over its alleged anti-competitive behavior in the mainframe software market. The current investigation was launched by the EU after several European companies filed their own complaints in a separate case, which was eventually brought to an indirect halt by IBM’s legal team.

IBM is exploring new opportunities involving high-performance and high-density computing on the component-level as well. This month Big Blue published new research about what may be the future of microprocessors.