IBM Watson, which was famous after beating three Jeopardy! champions a few years, has bought the Denver-based AlchemyAPI.
Explaining why this purchase was made, Stephen Gold, VP at IBM Watson Group, says, “From a technology perspective, AlchemyAPI’s deep learning platform will augment Watson’s ability to identify information hierarchies and understand relationships between people, places and things across both structured and unstructured data.”
Apart from acquiring an integral part of machine learning technology, IBM Watson also has access to a community of 40000 AlchemyAPI developers who have been building cognitive apps that IBM describes as “systems that can learn and interact with humans so as to extend what humans or machines can do on their own”.
What makes this purchase all that more advantageous to IBM is the fact that AlchemyAPI is a direct competitor and buying it out ensures that it is removed from the bigger picture completely. Of course, the technology and the community of developers are bonuses that IBM Watson can use to its benefit going forward.
Also, with the visual recognition technology that AlchemyAPI has on offer, IBM Watson can now add this to its platform offerings – an important piece that has been missing until now.
Alternatively, the AlchemyAPI community also gets to access a number of services unlike before such as SoftLayer Infrastructure as a Service, BlueMix which can be used to host and develop application as well as additional Software that are Service offerings. But that’s not all – IBM also offers a marketplace where they can sell the applications that are created.
That said, there is no guarantee that these developers might want to stay on and it is up to IBM to convince them to remain as customers.
AlchemyAPI was founded in 2005 and launched in 2009.