IBM to fire Watson IoT Platform from its cloud

IBM is set to put its Watson IoT Platform service on IBM Cloud into retirement. According to a customer email seen by The Register, IBM plans to "sunset the Watson IoT Platform service on IBM Cloud effective December 1st, 2023 without a direct replacement" after which access to the platform APIs would no longer be available. …

[karlkarl]

"Please note, devices will be unable to connect to the MQTT and HTTP endpoints and existing connections will be shut down. All remaining customers using this service should plan to move to alternative services before that time."

And anyone who originally jumped in board with this requirement of relying on IBM's Watson server to function, should not be let loose near computers or decision making ever again.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

No one ever got fired for avoiding IBM

[_olli]

Indeed this announcement shall raise eyebrows in corporations that have jumped into IBM Watson bandwagon with intention to use their IoT cloud platform to host industrial products with intended life cycle counted in decades.

What makes things worse is the IBM Watson IoT bluemix way of integrating services to IBM database solutions and concealing the underlaying server and container system from the user, so it won't be quite trivial to transfer the current services to run elsewhere without remarkable refactoring.

Lesson learned: Never lock your cloud software solutions to single vendor so that you couldn't easily relocate them to another cloud vendor. Same applies to AWS, Google.

[b0llchit]

Lets be kind

Hm, what is that word when translating humane into its computer equivalent? Computerane sounds kinda nice.

Wouldn't it be much more computerane to turn off all IoT services and devices? They no longer need to suffer. It is the best solution for us and them.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Lets be kind

You know what IoT is, right? It's a LOT more than just crappy Wifi security cameras from Aliexpress.

[JacobZ]

Watson

Hmmm, maybe sticking the Watson brand on unrelated offerings isn't a magic guarantee of success after all.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Watson

So far sticking the Watson brand on something means it's guaranteed to fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Watson

IBM Marketeers - having failed to understand the products then continually re-brand and align dissimilar products until the customer base are just as confused and bewildered. Then finally put out to pasture and a slow undignified death in the hands of HCL. What was Watson? Nobody knew or cared (other than the handful of users) and nobody in IBM could explain it or its value - but IBM needed a Cloud product of its own to hang announcements off of.

IBM is a company with a cloud vision that nobody understands or wants and a series of bread-and-butter infrastructure products that it no longer wants to sell. Difficult to see any good news coming around the corner any time soon...

[amanfromMars 1]

Be Kind ..... Know your Frenemies and Foe alike and Warn Them of Forthcoming Gloom and Doom.

What Mega MetaDataBase companies, and there is a wealth of them well enough known out there activated in the field, are themselves discovering about the Vast and Exotic IoT thing and Erotic Customer Centric Cloud Services, is that IT and AI assets in valued pioneering customers' command and control are many times more powerful than they, the virtual infrastructure/exoskeletal servers, ever even imagined to be possible, and way beyond the reach of any of their secondary third party influences/mitigations.

However, to imagine that pulling the plug on services already delivered will have any negative halting effect is proof positive that their sysadmins are totally unaware and therefore also catastrophically unprepared for resultant consequences of desperate sub-prime actions and sudden withdrawals of previously prime products/doctored goods.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Be Kind ..... Know your Frenemies and Foe alike and Warn Them of Forthcoming Gloom and Doom.

>Erotic Customer Centric Cloud Services

Not something I'd want to source from IBM.

I mean, kinky is one thing - but there are limits!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Be Kind ..... Know your Frenemies and Foe alike and Warn Them of Forthcoming Gloom and Doom.

Oh I don't know. At least with IBM you're guaranteed to get screwed....

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Be Kind ..... Know your Frenemies and Foe alike and Warn Them of Forthcoming Gloom and Doom.

But not in a way that makes you feel satisfied afterwards

[Grunchy]

Never trust “the cloud”

It’s just a whisp of vapour that may dissipate at any second, for no reason at all.

(Ken Jennings retakes Jeopardy crown?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad

... but a bit shit.

I have spent quite a lot of time with IoT. My platforms of choice are Zwave, Zigbee and quite a few more. Home Assistant draws it all together.

My doorbell (Door Bird) is PoE powered via a UPS backed switch. I have also wired in a battery backed chime. If the internet decides to wander off, the chime will still sound.

In general that is my approach to home automation - all IoT stuff should if possible have an off-line.manual control/signal.

I have never used Watson (and didn't even realise it was available) for IoT. I don't need "magic" which is what Watson seems to offer.

I do not allow anyone called Alexa, Siri, Google or whatevs to hang around and look shady in my place either.

[Dan 55]

Re: Sad

What about that doorbell scoping your place out on the opposite side of the road?

[AbominableCodeman]

Re: Sad

When you're at the point you can strip down commodity IOT devices, and re-flash them to run Tasmota against Home Assistant, you can usually think of some fun and useful things to do with a $2 near infra-red laser diode.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mental Watson

Deep blue and the subsequent " Watson" tech were indeed groundbreaking at some point in time but IBM manglement and producktizing and IBM braindeding , i mean Branding, kill anything they touch. Watson might have survived if the engineers and developers were allowed realistic goals and general quiet time to innovate what is essentially old outdated tech shoved inside a modern shell.

Ahh But Ginned Up Roamer disaster dumped it on unsuspecting patients before it was fully baked. And now its too outdated and mostly useless.

[GruntyMcPugh]

Oh, this is really going to impact,....

.... about three companies, looking at the case studies on the IoT web site: https://www.ibm.com/uk-en/cloud/internet-of-things

Powerboats, a Brewery, and L'Oreal.

I don't care for powerboats or beauty products, and kind of think a brewery using 'AI technology' (their words not mine) are really over thinking brewing. Unless the 'AI' just turns the lights off in the giftshop out of hours, of course.

[Il'Geller]

Re: Oh, this is really going to impact,....

Initially and since then IBM has been using the wrong technology: IBM was convinced that if the use of paragraphs and made manually annotations is enough for the Jeopardy! quiz, then the same technology is more than enough for artificial intelligence in general. As a result IBM has constantly been losing the race for AI, not seeing that the main problem is in the removal of unnecessary, meaningless phrases (which pollute the search).