IBM Watson Health hampered by internal rivalries and disorganization, former employees say

When IBM launched its Watson Health division three years ago, promising to revolutionize medicine, not everyone in the sprawling technology company was on board.

An existing group of employees was already working with health care clients and had its own secure cloud to store data, according to two former employees. But the new Watson Health team, with headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., started promoting another cloud, creating what seemed to be duplication — even competition — between old and new guards.

“There was a lot of internal friction,” one of the former employees told STAT. “There were two products that did exactly the same thing, that were being sold by two different parts of the company, that had two different development roadmaps.”

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