IBM Watson ecosystem vs Microsoft Cortana Intelligence

Cortana Intelligence suite augment your users’ experience, customize responses, and drive appropriate actions with intelligent agents. Enable your solutions to see, hear, speak, and interpret the world around you. The IBM Watson ecosystem empowers you to develop powered by IBM Watson cognitive capabilities in your applications.

Of course it is very hard to compare two worlds (IBM and Microsoft solutions), but let's take a look at each competitor's offering in greater details.

How does Watson compares to Cortana Intelligence Suite ? 

This diagram shows my view of the relationships between two worlds:

Following is an highlight of the perceived strenghts of IBM offering:

• Watson’s storytelling: Watson brand awareness, from Jeopardy show appearances to IT market.
• Watson as product: IBM sales approach is to sell Watson solutions “as a product”.
• Watson Analytics has compelling data sets: Twitter, The Weather Company data are useful data streams for Watson analytics solutions.
• Watson IoT: Watson IoT Platform is the hub for many IoT solutions, for example the platform is specialized for Automotive, Insurance, Electronics, etc.

Following is an highlight of the perceived strenghts of Microsoft offering:

• Azure’s strong cloud story: Microsoft has the largest enterprise cloud, with over 35 data centers globally and 24/7 availability. Microsoft is the only vendor recognized as a leader across Gartner's Magic Quadrants for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions for enterprise cloud workloads.
• Hyperscale cloud: Hyperscale computing is necessary in order to build a robust and scalable cloud, big data, map reduce, or distributed storage system. Microsoft sites are some of the biggest Hyperscale data centers around the world due greater investments.
• Partner’s ecosystem: Microsoft deeply values its partners and the Azure’s solutions they deliver to our mutual customers. Microsoft Partner Network is designed to make resources available to a wide variety of technology companies so they can build a business around Microsoft technologies. The program consists of over 640,000 partners.
• Native and full integration with edge devices: Microsoft designs hardware component involved in Intelligence solution as Kinect, HoloLens, Seeing AI lens.
• Cortana Virtual assistant: full integration among intelligence components, including Cortana, bot framework, cognitive service to implement end to end scenario.
• Leverage on Bing search engine to improve machine learning algorithms
• Microsoft provides SharePoint, Yammer, Outlook and other enterprise collaboration tools, underpinned by Power BI to fuel personal productivity with advanced analytics.
• Leverage on Minecraft: The Malmo platform is a sophisticated AI experimentation platform built on top of Minecraft, and designed to support fundamental research in artificial intelligence.

Far from being comprehensive and established, this analysis however offers the perspective of someone who has spent a fair number of years working with IBM Watson and recently involved in the same camp as part of Microsoft team.

Lastly, it is also pivotal to draw a short comparison in terms of commercial offering: 

Finally, a comparison of their service APIs is provided in my blog post