IBM has confirmed that is going to sell its meteorology division to the investor Francisco Partners, which will manage it as an independent company. The division, which includes The Weather Channel, Weather.com, Weather Underground and Storm Radar, it will not be divided, since Francisco Partners will buy both its area aimed at the consumer market and that destined for companies. It is unknown how much he will pay for it.
At IBM they have been evaluating the sale of these assets since last April. The division, bought between 2015 and 2016, for around 2,000 million dollars, was acquired as part of a plan to expand its presence in the Internet of Things market, which in that year was quite popular, both in the consumption as in companies of all sectors.
But since then, IBM has reoriented its business lines and plans to give the greatest presence to its cloud computing areas. It has even divested its infrastructure division, wrapping it up in a separate spinoff under the name Kyndryl. In 2022, it also sold a part of its Watson Health division to Francisco Partners, for which it received around 1 billion dollars.
If everything goes as expected, the operation will close before next April. Also included in the sale are the science and technology platform for the division’s weather forecasting and enterprise data services for media, broadcasting, aviation and advertising. Francisco Partners has plans to dedicate part of the division more to the consumer, adding new user tools related to health and wellness.
Yes indeed, IBM will keep the sustainability software suite, which until now operated within the meteorology division. will also continue to have access to the meteorological data of the new company, which it uses to power some of the Artificial Intelligence models it sells to companies. These, which in some cases are trained with NASA satellite data, are focused on climate analysis and obtaining data that, among other things, help monitor natural disasters.
