[jmsduran]

As a former IBM'er, I can't help but view this announcement with a fair bit of skepticism.

The IBM I used to know had a tendency to tightly couple all of their products and offerings, to the point of making it uncompetitive/unattractive in the market. This makes sense when you consider that IBM has been going through 6 straight quarters of declining revenue, and their Systems & Technology Group being unable to turn a profit despite thousands of employee layoffs. Assuming this announcement is no different, I expect this new offering to be proprietary, SAAS-like, and rife with restrictions limiting application development to an IBM-approved stack (Rational, Jazz, DB2, etc).

I have no doubt that Watson is an excellent piece of technology, but I believe IBM's executive and CEO leadership will mess this up by treating this offering the same way as their consulting and hardware services.