Watson is a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO and industrialist Thomas J. Watson. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!. In 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Watson received the first place prize of $1 million. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the Internet during the game. For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble in a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words. In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint. IBM Watson's former business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.

Amazon Web Services has developed the managed cloud platform AWS IoT to let connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS Endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely. With AWS IoT, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all your devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.

On top of this platform, AWS also offers a variety of analytics solutions by AWS or third-party suppliers that can help meet all kinds of needs related to data analysis.

Oracle is a leader in enterprise software and provides hardware and services to help companies improve their processes. Best known for its focus on databases, it offers aid in areas such as managing business data, collaboration and application development, customer relationship management, and supply chain management. Year founded; 1977 Revenue: $38.2 billion (2015) NYSE: ORCL

Altair is a leading provider of enterprise-class engineering software enabling innovation, reduced development times, and lower costs through the entire product lifecycle from concept design to in-service operation. Our simulation-driven approach to innovation is powered by our integrated suite of software which optimizes design performance across multiple disciplines encompassing structures, motion, fluids, thermal management, electromagnetics, system modeling and embedded systems, while also providing data analytics and true-to-life visualization and rendering.

Watson has come a long way since it won on the American quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. Back then, it did one thing: natural language Q&A, powered by five technologies. Today, Q&A is just one of more than 30 Watson capabilities—all of which have been turned into digital services, or Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), delivered via the cloud. This means that we can literally build cognition into everything digital. With Watson, every digital application, product and process can understand, reason and learn. You can see why cognitive is becoming the heart of our solutions businesses. What started as one Watson unit is now a growing family: the core Watson team, which continues to build new capabilities and nurture its expanding ecosystem; and individual Watson businesses, aimed at particular industries or professional domains, such as IBM Watson Health and IBM Watson Internet of Things. Each business brings together Watson capabilities with industry expertise, vast data sets and an ecosystem of partners and clients, and each is powered by the IBM Cloud.

The AWS IoT Device Gateway enables devices to securely and efficiently communicate with AWS IoT. The Device Gateway can exchange messages using a publication/subscription model, which enables one-to-one and one-to-many communications. With this one-to-many communication pattern AWS IoT makes it possible for a connected device to broadcast data to multiple subscribers for a given topic. The Device Gateway supports MQTT and HTTP 1.1 protocols and you can easily implement support for proprietary or legacy protocols. The Device Gateway scales automatically to support over a billion devices without provisioning infrastructure.

In this connected world, the proliferation of Intelligent Devices has created a market for entirely new solutions based on Internet of Things (IoT) technology. With the ever-increasing amount of data that is inherent in an IoT world, the key to gaining real business value is effective communication among all elements of the architecture. Oracle’s IoT platform delivers an integrated, secure, comprehensive platform for the entire IoT architecture across all vertical markets. Its IoT solution allows companies to gain new data-driven insights and drive actions from IoT data, enabling their businesses to deliver innovative new services faster than their competitors, with less risk.

CONSULTING Product Engineering Industrial Design Tailored Solutions DISCIPLINES Cloud Computing e-Mobility Internet of Things Lightweighting Model-Based Development

NASA JPL, Philips, Sonos

Amazon, Dell, PayPal