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Actually, The Weather Company isn't totally ditching Amazon for IBM

Matt Rosoff
Aha
Aha

(Google)

Earlier this week, IBM announced that The Weather Company, best known for The Weather Channel, was "migrating its weather data platform to IBM Cloud."

The deal included some other aspects, like integration of weather data into IBM's analytics tools, but the part that caught our eye was this:

"The Weather Company, including WSI will shift its massive weather data services platform to the IBM Cloud."

This is interesting because The Weather Company had been a pretty vocal customer of Amazon's rival cloud service, Amazon Web Services. They even participated in a case study.

A "shift" and "migration" seemed like a nice takeaway by IBM.

Except today, we heard from Amazon that this wasn't true. The Weather Channel would continue to be an AWS customer.

Amazon's chief technology officer Werner Vogels even went so far as to call IBM out on Twitter:

Vogels also retweeted a tweet from Weather Company CIO Bryson Koehler who insisted that the company's relationship with AWS remained strong and growing.

So we called Koehler and got the real story.

In fact, the company is using both clouds.

It's going to move its business-to-business unit, WSI, from a private data center to IBM's SoftLayer, but it's also going to continue using AWS for its consumer business, although it might migrate some workloads from other businesses over to IBM's cloud as needed.

"I am excited about moving to the IBM cloud for B2B. I remain excited about our partnership with AWS for other parts of our business," he put it.

"I believe in a multi-cloud story," he told us. "I’ve said this for years — we’ve built technology at The Weather Company that allows us to be agnostic to cloud providers, I think being agnostic is the right decision. Being able to run in multiple cloud vendors in a hot, hot, hot way is right to do for resiliency, latency, and global deployment."

Koehler said he particularly likes IBM's technology for shifting workloads among physical data centers around the world.

But in the end, he hasn't signed an exclusive deal with anybody.

"We're going to balance our workloads in real time based on what works best for our business. If that turns out to be SoftLayer, we're going move more workloads there. If that turns out to be AWS, we'll move workloads there."

Later, WSI president Mark Gildersleeve sent us an email with even more detail:

1. WSI is migrating all of our B2B cloud and on premise application load from AWS and our data centers to IBM Softlayer this year.

2. As The Weather Company has said in recent years, TWC is moving to a multi-vendor cloud architecture.

3. The Weather Company and WSI will begin balancing our consumer and B2B API workload across IBM and AWS cloud environments later this year. Once we have the IBM instances up and running at scale, we will shift more of our API workload to IBM.

So my original story wasn't exactly right. I am sorry about that.

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