IBM is bolstering its commitment to bringing cognitive computing into the enterprise mainstream with a new business unit that will focus exclusively on commercializing Watson, the company announced at a recent New York event. The move, which follows a similar decision by Cisco to consolidate its Internet of Things offerings under a single division, underscores CEO Virginia Rometty’s lofty ambition to turn the Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer into a $10 billion business.

The Watson Group is hitting the ground running with $1 billion in capital, $100 million of which will be put aside for cultivating an application ecosystem on top of the platform. Another portion will be spent on the unit’s new 120,000 square feet headquarters in Manhattan’s East Village, right across the street from Facebook’s local offices.

“Clearly IBM understand that Watson is an important part of their future success, so they’re starting to invest in it now,” Wikibon’s Jeff Kelly commented on the latest episode of theCUBE Conversations. “I would imagine that number will increase, I mean the billion dollars, over the next couple of years, over the next 10 years. Really this is a 10-year play; this is very early days for Watson and the whole cognitive computing space as they’re calling it. So I suspect that number will increase significantly.”

The Watson Group is rolling out three services on launch, all based on something called Foundations, which IBM pegs as an end-to-end toolkit for processing different datasets from a variety of sources. The bundle provides real-time and predictive analytics, as well as “decision making” and information management capabilities  including governance, integration and in-memory functions. The technologies can all be purchased independently, IBM said, which makes them accessible to smaller customers with limited budgets.

Foundations powers Watson Discovery Advisor, a natural language processing tool that can automatically sift through millions of documents and identify relevant patterns. The service, which is geared towards companies in research-oriented fields like pharma and publishing, is complemented by Watson Analytics, a visualization solution that applies the same algorithms to provide decision makers with a natural language interface for interpreting business metrics. The third offering is Watson Explorer, an information discovery and search platform that doubles as a framework for developing data-driven applications. These can “deliver a comprehensive, contextually-relevant view of any topic,” according to IBM.

image source IBM