IBM and Mubadala Development Company (Mubadala), the Abu Dhabi-based investment and development company, announced an agreement to bring IBM Watson to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The companies will collaborate to deliver powerful Watson cloud-based cognitive computing to health care, retail, education, banking and finance organizations. The new joint venture will also create a broad regional ecosystem of partners, entrepreneurs, start-ups and app developers.

Watson represents a new era in computing in which systems are able to interact in natural language, analyze large volumes of unstructured data, respond to complex questions with evidence-based answers, and discover new actionable patterns and insights.

The availability of Watson in MENA demonstrates Mubadala’s strong commitment to spurring innovation and growing the technology ecosystem throughout the region. The collaboration with IBM exemplifies Mubadala’s philosophy to capitalize on investment opportunities in various industries. IBM, in turn, will draw on Mubadala’s deep regional market knowledge to drive the adoption of cognitive computing technology.

International Data Corporation (IDC) projects that spending on ICT products and services in the region will cross the $270 billion mark in 2015, making this area of the world the second-fastest growing IT market.

“This new joint venture with IBM will put both the UAE and broader MENA region on the leading edge for adoption of this breakthrough technology,” said Homaid Al-Shemmari, CEO of Aerospace & Engineering Services at Mubadala.