IBM recently announced that it had acquired The Weather Company’s business-to-business, mobile and cloud-based web properties, and the data gained in this acquisition will allow the company to do more than tell you if you need an umbrella today.

Inhi Cho Suh, VP of strategy and business development of IBM Analytics, said that the weather has a big impact not only on our everyday lives, but also on our businesses.

“Environmental conditions actually account for almost a half a trillion of economic loss on an annual basis just in the U.S. alone,” Suh told Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during IBM Insight 2015. “So our opportunity to kind of put what we consider atmospheric science, data analytics, and that rigor of precision forecasting and predictive to really fundamentally change business decision making is a huge opportunity for every client to kind of transform,” she furthered.

Suh explained that leveraging that weather data is simply another example of ways IBM is giving businesses the tools needed to make the right decisions.

“At a very fundamental level, leaders always want to make better decisions, and to do that, there’s been an evolution of the tools that have been available,” Suh said. “And it’s always been about how do you extract that knowledge with a degree of confidence then to take action on it.”

She added, “Now what we were thinking was, how do you actually automate that more into a business process?”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Insight 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE