IBM has announced it will open a global headquarters for its Watson Internet of Things (IoT) in Munich, Germany. The new unit is part of IBM’s effort to advance connected devices and cognitive computing.

Cognitive computing platforms use natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data.

The Munich unit, the first of its kind in Europe, will be located in the HighLight Towers. The campus is expected to house a total of 1000 IBM developers, consultants, researchers and designers.

IBM’s IoT software is developed through the company’s Watson IoT cloud. IBM had previously announced it intends to broaden Watson’s capability in order to allow developers to operate with a new set of cognitive API’s, technologies and artificial intelligence tools through the cloud.

The American technology giant will give customers who wish to develop and create next generation cognitive IoT apps direct access to the cloud-based platform - a move IBM has baptised “Industry 4.0 Innovation”.

Harriet Green, general manager of the Watson IoT, has high hopes for the cognitive computing software "The Internet of Things will soon be the largest single source of data on the planet, yet almost 90 percent of that data is never acted upon".

"With its unique abilities to sense, reason and learn, Watson opens the door for enterprises, governments and individuals to finally harness this real-time data, compare it with historical data sets and deep reservoirs of accumulated knowledge, and then find unexpected correlations that generate new insights to benefit business and society alike," she added.

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