IBM brings Watson to any cloud

IBM today announced that it is freeing its Watson-branded AI services -- like the Watson Assistant for building conversational interfaces and Watson OpenScale for managing the AI life cycle -- from its own cloud and allowing enterprises to take its platform and running it in their own data centers. In a way, you can think of this as Watson as a managed service. "Clients are really struggling with infusing AI into their applications because the data is distributed in multiple places," IBM Watson's CTO and chief architects Ruchir Puri told me when I asked him for IBM's reasoning behind this move. "It's in these hybrid environments, they've got multiple cloud implementations, they have data in their private cloud as well. They have been struggling because the providers of AI have been trying to lock them into a particular implementation that is not suitable to this hybrid cloud environment."