“My Watson business is miniscule today, but we have been eager to work with our healthcare, financial services, and retail customers about bringing more intelligence into solving their problems,” said Simon Parkins, group sales director for APSU, an IBM partner based in the UK. He expects Watson-based solutions to represent as much as 25 percent of his company’s revenue in the next five years.  

That’s where Stephen Gold, vice president of IBM Watson Group, comes in. Gold oversees global marketing for the group and is responsible for the ecosystem and partner programs.

Gold said he believes in three years every doctor, lawyer and financial analyst will have access to a Watson-based solution that caters specifically to those market niches.

He is bullish about the technology he said will give IBM partners a huge edge over straight data analytics solutions offered up by market leaders Tableau and Oracle’s Exadata. Both these data analytics companies slice and dice Big Data sets and can spot trends and predict outcomes. Watson, however, uses its so-called cognitive technology to analyze, learn, and deliver evidence based answers when asked questions.

For example, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic in Maryland are using Watson to correlate data from genome sequencing with years of data from medical journals, reports and clinical records. Watson can parse those data sets using its cognitive system and identifying patterns in genome sequencing and link that information to medical data to reveal insights that might help oncologists develop treatments that will work specifically with individual patients' DNA for better treatment outcomes.

“Cognitive is IBM’s pixie dust in the business intelligence space,” Gold said.

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