IBM has acquired The Weather Company’s mobile, B2B and cloud-based web properties for a sum reported to be around $2bn (£1.3bn), according to the FT.

The deal includes Weather.com, Weather Underground, WSI  and The Weather Company, but not the Weather Channel TV segment, which will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract.

While digital and TV will be split between different owners, it will still be possible to buy across both channels, according to AdAge, at least in the short term.

For IBM, the acquisition is intended to serve as the foundation for its new Watson IoT (Internet of Things) Unit and IoT Cloud platform.

“The Weather Company’s extremely high-volume data platform, coupled with IBM’s global cloud and the advanced cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, will be unsurpassed in the Internet of Things, providing our clients significant competitive advantage as they link their business and sensor data with weather and other pertinent information in real time,” said John Kelly, IBM SVP solutions portfolio and research. “This powerful cloud platform will position IBM to arm entire industries with deep multimodal insights that will help enterprises gain clarity and take action from the oceans of data being generated around them.”