IBM‘s Watson Marketing platform officially launched as a standalone company. This news comes about three months after the tech giant announced it would sell off its commerce and marketing cloud business to investment management firm Centerbridge Partners.
In a blog post, CEO Mark Simpson argued the new company will be mature enough yet agile enough to take on major cloud marketing competitors like Adobe, Oracle, and Salesforce.
“With over 1,000 people on day one, we’re far from a small company,” he wrote. “And yet, we’re also able to be one of the nimblest and most responsive to industry changes of any other marketing cloud. We aren’t weighed down by unrelated businesses and large company structures like our competitors, but we have the experience and capabilities to match them and are able to focus 100% on the marketer.”
In his blog post, Simpson laid out a number of priorities for the new company — including expansion beyond marketing technology, promising to soon announce new partnerships to bring together marketing and advertising. He also promised to make it easier for other companies to work with the new spinoff, by expanding its “open marketing ecosystem.”
The new company will also “double down on AI by investing in a robust data science team… and more product designers,” Simpson said.
Another early priority will be to unify the company’s underlying data structure to improve the way its products connect with each other.
“Today the company is squarely focused on the emerging, high-value segments of the IT industry and accelerating our leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud, SaaS, blockchain, and supply chain, among other strategic technologies,” IBM General Manager Inhi C. Suh wrote in a blog post following the announcement of the deal with Centerbridge Partners.
