Microblogging innovator, Twitter and tech giant IBM have entered into a partnership to amalgamate Twitter’s vast data silos with IBM’s cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms, and consulting services.

Early last week, the move was announced and both parties believe will “help transform how businesses and institutions understand their customers, markets and trends – and inform every business decision.”

“Twitter provides a powerful new lens through which to look at the world – as both a platform for hundreds of millions of consumers and business professionals, and as a synthesizer of trends,” notes Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and CEO. “This partnership, drawing on IBM’s leading cloud-based analytics platform, will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data. This is the latest example of how IBM is reimagining work.”

“IBM brings a unique combination of cloud-based analytics solutions and a global services team that can help companies utilize this truly unique data,” believes Chris Moody, Vice President of Twitter Data Strategy. “Companies have had successes with Twitter data – from manufacturers more effectively managing inventory to consumer electronic companies doing rapid product development. This partnership with IBM will allow faster innovation across a broader range of use cases at scale,” he added.

A news release reports that the Alliance will look to capitalize through three salient aspects:

• Integration of Twitter data with IBM analytics services on the cloud: The Twitter data will be provided as part of select cloud-based services, including IBM Watson Analytics, and a cloud-based data refinery service that enables application developers to embed data services in applications. Entrepreneurs and software developers will also be able to integrate Twitter data into new cloud services they are building with IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud or IBM Bluemix platform-as-a-service.
• New data-intensive capabilities for the enterprise: IBM and Twitter will deliver a set of enterprise applications to help improve business decisions across industries and professions.
• Specialized enterprise consulting: IBM Global Business Services professionals will have access to Twitter data to enrich consulting services for clients across business. Additionally, IBM and Twitter will collaborate to develop unique solutions for specific industries such as banking, consumer products, retail, and travel and transportation.

With this collaboration IBM and Twitter are looking to enrich existing enterprise data streams to improve business decisions across industries and professions. For instance, “the integration of social data with enterprise data can help accelerate product development by predicting long-term trends or drive real-time demand forecasting based on real-time situations like weather patterns,” reports the news release.

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(Image Credit: Garrett Heath)