IBM is set to make this the year of mainstream adoption of its cloud analytics tool Watson.
In a push to ISVs and developers, it is adding all major European languages this year and claims some 80,000 developers world-wide.
It has also signed deals with major integrators such as KPMG and other European vendors such as SAP. It indicates that having invested heavily in managing the early uptake with a good deal of hand-on time with partners, it expects cognitive computing become pervasive and deployed at scale.
"We are finding that it is not necessary for developers to build new apps - rather it is infusing Watson into existing solutions," says Phil Westcott, who manages the Watson ecosystem programme across Europe.
"We have reduced the barriers to entry, make delivery cost-efficient and seen a step change in its adoption. Watson is being used in a wider range of solutions, since, for example, the APIs have increased quarter on quarter, with new ones being added weekly"
For users, the effect of wider deployment should go un-noticed. "Watson is embedded naturally; it becomes the engine room, while capable of producing more elegant solutions."
The major verticals seem to be retail, healthcare and financial services, with education also a surprisingly strong area, but since it is applicable anywhere where there is unstructured data, it can go anywhere.
"The cognitive era has arrived," said Lynne Doughtie, KPMG LLP Chairman and CEO. "KPMG's use of IBM Watson technology will help advance our team's ability to analyse and act on the core financial and operational data so central to the health of organisations and the capital markets. In addition to the possibilities for enhancing quality, the potential for cognitive and related technologies to help us pursue new business offerings is extraordinary."
One current initiative is focused on employing supervised cognitive capabilities to analyse much larger volumes of structured and unstructured data related to a company's financial information, as auditors "teach" the technology how to fine-tune assessments over time. This enables audit teams to have faster access to increasingly precise measurements that help them analyse anomalies and assess whether additional steps are necessary.
One limiting factor is the available skills in working with unstructured data; IBM has been working with universities across Europe to boost students' exposure to cognitive computing systems, but the cutting edge will remain with the ISVs and developers, particularly those looking to add it to existing solutions.
In the wider aspect Aberdeen University has just become one of only four UK Institutions to have access to the Watson Engagement Advisor solution and its experts. It will initially be used by students undertaking the Department of Computing Science's Semantic Web Engineering module. It will eventually be offered more widely across a range of relevant programmes. Academics at the University are already undertaking cutting-edge cognitive computing research using Watson.
Researchers are collaborating with a team of IBM scientists on the EU Marie Curie K-Drive project, which investigates ways of understanding and utilising big data and knowledge graphs for applications, such as those in the treatment of cancers. This involves using IBM Watson's question & answering, knowledge representation and dialogue capabilities. The results of the work will also form the basis of new research proposals from the University for the EU Horizon 2020 Programme.
As Paul Chong, Head of the IBM Watson Group for EMEA told last month's European Software and Solutions Summit in London, "We are moving systems that determine the response using rules-based solutions, to a probabilistic state. This reflects the way humans think."