International Business Machines Corp. announced today it agreed to the sale of its weather business, The Weather Company, including The Weather Channel mobile, Weather.com, Weather Underground and Storm Radar, to Francisco Partners for an undisclosed sum.

The deal follows earlier reports that IBM was exploring a potential sale of the assets in April. The agreement also includes enterprise offerings for broadcast, media, aviation, advertising technology and cloud-based data solutions for other industries.

The tech-focused investment company Francisco Partners said it intends to spin off part of Weather Company into its own standalone unit to become more consumer facing and focus on how weather affects the lives of everyday people, including their health and well-being.

IBM’s weather unit emerged from the acquisition of The Weather Company in 2016 in a deal worth $2 billion in a bid to incorporate its weather monitoring, data, mobile and cloud properties into its business. At the time, IBM didn’t buy The Weather Channel TV channel, but did license weather forecast data and analytics to the media outlet under a long-term contract.

The company’s interest in The Weather Company was touted as an internet of things and big data grab as its platform pulled data from numerous sources from around the world by providing it more than 3 billion forecast points to work with. In an interview with SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s video studio, during the announcement of acquisition then Weather Company CEO David Kenny said the company had developed its own technology to send data quickly between private cloud operations

The Weather Company currently provides highly accurate weather data to more than 415 million people each month through its various outlets, including The Weather Channel mobile app and website. The data is also consumed by more than 2,000 businesses and enterprise interests across a variety of industries through its enterprise offerings.

Data provided by the service includes radar, internet of things telemetry and satellite information. IBM even added data channels from aircraft and smartphones in 2019 to improve weather prediction in remote parts of the world.

As part of the agreement, IBM will retain access to The Weather Company’s weather data, which it uses to train and power some of its weather-related artificial intelligence models for enterprise clients for weather prediction, crop modeling and land management.

The sale follows IBM’s current streamlining of its operations to focus on core opportunities in software, cloud and artificial intelligence. The company began to strip itself of assets that did not match this strategy starting in 2022 when it sold a number of software products and other services from its Watson Health business to Francisco Partners.

“Over the last few years, we’ve evolved IBM to be a hybrid cloud and AI company,” said Rob Thomas, senior vice president of software and chief commercial officer at IBM. “We regularly review our portfolio to make sure our business areas are core to that strategy, and today’s news reflects our continued focus on these two transformational technologies.”

One of those initiatives that the company has put more focus into recently has been the watsonx family of products, which target the growing popularity of generative AI amid developers and professionals looking to build it into their enterprise applications. IBM has been making numerous inroads into AI development in part given its massive demand. The watsonx platform features AI-assisted code generation, numerous large-scale AI models, geospatial data and The Weather Company’s weather data.

Photo: Pixabay