IBM’s announcement that it would take over The Weather Company was perplexing to some, but not to The Weather Company’s Chief Information & Technology Officer, Bryson Koehler. To him, it’s a natural fit, and the reason basically comes down to data.

Koehler told John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that The Weather Company provides a huge and highly useful data set to IBM. This data set, according to him, will boost IBM’s current and future Big Data undertakings and offerings.

“Weather was the original Big Data problem,” said Koehler. “The first application ever written on a mainframe was a weather forecast, and ever since then everybody’s been trying to make the forecast more accurate — a lot of it comes from more data,” he explained.

Watson grows another tentacle

Furrier and Vellante spoke with Koehler about the growing digitization and how data plays into that. Koehler said that data from The Weather Company will add to IBM Watson’s capabilities and knowledge base.

“Watson can only be as smart as the data you feed it,” he said. He added that The Weather Company’s MO was highly compatible and valuable to IBM’s business. “The capability to ingest, transform, store, do analytics on, provide alerting on, and then distribute data — that’s what we do,” he stated.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2016. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE