Is Watson Workspace dead or only resting?
by Volker Weber
Mutliple sources tell me that Watson Workspace has been pulled from sellers to sell. There is no official statement and nobody says anything on the record.
Watson Workspace is, or shall I say was, IBM's effort to provide enterprise chat. It was first announced in 2016 at the IBM Connect conference in Orlando with a canned presentation that pretended to be live code. It was only running on Powerpoint though. Development continued at a glacial pace because IBM first developed the platform called Watson Work Services and then Watson Workspace as an application of Work Services. Meanwhile, the whole of IBM became Slack's largest customer and Microsoft started to roll out Teams to its massive Office 365 base. Watson Workspace was augmented with Zoom video conferencing and sold as Workspace Plus. Until yesterday.
You can still try Watson Workspace for free, without Zoom, at workspace.ibm.com so it may only be resting.
Comments
Perhaps it's dead?
I'm pretty sure. Put there is a process in IBM until a channel announcement can go out.
It's pinin' for the fjords, it is.
Yes it's dead, first solution named Watson, that is dead apparently.
Looks like it's dead now. The Marketplace links redirect to https://www.ibm.com/collaboration.
HCL announced that they have their own plans to develop a persistant chat client at the "Engage" user community conference this year. That is probably the reason why they did not even want to buy Watson Workspace as part of the big announcement with IBM lately.
