IBM has opened up its Watson technology to Indian companies with an eye to propel its growth in India.

Watson is a machine learning technology that uses cognitive computing to reproduce effects similar to the human brain. The world’s largest tech company, brought its Watson Health to India, has partnered with Manipal Hospital to address the health issues concerning 1.2 billion people.

Addressing reporters, Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President and CEO of IBM, said that as a part of its strategy, Watson will be open to all the stakeholders such as students, software developers and entrepreneurs. “Now, we have over 30 Watson services available and this will accelerate growth in cognitive computing,” said Rometty, who is coming to India within a gap of 7 months since her last visit in July 2015.

Currently, Watson's technology is being used by 77,000 developers and Rometty is hoping that by opening its Application Programming Interface (APIs), it will attract more such developers to its platform. IBM's strategy is similar to Google, Facebook and other tech giants which believe that opening up their APIs will help in increased adoption. APIs are the software equivalent of translators that help in interpreting commands.

Eyeing start-ups IBM is also eyeing the Indian start-up community to adopt Watson. “The (Watson) community is prototyping and building cloud-based cognitive computing applications as we want to stretch the boundaries of what it can achieve,” said Rometty.

She added the company has allocated $100 million of venture investments to support start-ups but did not give specifics on how much of that would be made available for Indian start-ups.

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