IBM is rolling out a "Ready for Watson" program to help companies use subsets of Watson's analytics tools and other existing products. The company also has plans to make Watson available as a cloud-based service for such industries as healthcare, telecom and financial services, according to an article on CNN.

Turning Watson into a commercial system has taken some time since its debut as a Jeopardy contestant last year, but a number of beta customers will be brought on board in upcoming months. The company envisions a future in which financial companies might use Watson to find potential acquisition targets and the healthcare industry might use Watson to aid doctors in determining treatment protocols. The WellPoint insurance company is the first pilot customer to make commercial use of the supercomputer, with a deployment at Mount Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, as described in a previous infoboom article.

But before any company can sign up for supercomputer service, some thought needs to go into the state of the data. Technology Review cites Stephen Gold, director of worldwide marketing with IBM, as saying that customers need to have the right data sets organized in the right way.

Although their data sets may be quite large, many midsize companies don't have true "big data" at hand. This customer would still benefit from other analytics tools, and the Ready for Watson program serves as an "on ramp" to using subsets of Watson's analytics right away, until those companies have the big data needed to take advantage of Watson's full capabilities.

Another data challenge facing midsize businesses is in where the data actually resides. Most businesses have truly disparate data, in terms of both dissimilarity and lack of integration. This is further affected by data location; as businesses move to the cloud, many find that data associated with legacy systems and that of productivity systems are neither housed in the same place, nor are they synchronized or integrated. The challenge is for IT to identify tools and strategies to enable data to be unified in such a way as to allow analytics tools to best exploit all data sources.

Although it is still too early to say when a fully commercial Watson-in-the-cloud analytics package might be available, it isn't too soon for IT to think about how to manage, synchronize, and validate company data from the on-site enterprise to the cloud so that it is accessible and usable, or to investigate "best in class" analytics tools for their industry. No matter how innovative the next generation analytics tools may be, the data must first exist and be organized so that the tools can be used.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.