IBM is looking at using its breakthrough Watson technology internally to help better equip its sales people to sell IBM hardware, software and services.

IBM vice president and chief information officer Jeanette Horan noted that IBM has been able to bring together multiple sources of information, such as customer information, market information, pricing and more. “We need to understand how to bring al; this information together and to get rid of all the rows and columns and be able to use unstructured data,” she said. “We want to have our sales people ask an unstructured question and get an answer… You have to continue to evolve your body of knowledge.”

Watson is the computer system IBM designed that won a Jeopardy! challenge against some of the game show’s biggest winners. IBM calls Watson a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel Power7 processors and IBM’s DeepQA question answering software. Watson applies advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to answering questions.