On Thursday, IBM will announce that Watson will be available to companies, academics and individual software developers as a cloud product that is “more than twice as powerful via the Internet … and at a small fraction of the previous cost,” The New York Times revealed Wednesday.

In October, IBM announced that “organizations gaining competitive advantage through high cloud adoption are reporting almost double the revenue growth and nearly 2.5 times higher gross profit growth than peer companies that are more cautious about cloud computing, from a recent [IBM ] survey conducted with more than 800 business decision makers and users worldwide.”

In a September forecast of public cloud services, worldwide, 2011-2017 [2], Gartner predicted “continued strong growth in public cloud services, with a CAGR of 16.9% from 2012 through 2017. End-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 18% in 2013 to $132 billion. By 2017, the public cloud services market is predicted to exceed $244 billion.”

UPDATE Nov. 14, 2013: see IBM to take Watson to the cloud, opens to app developers

