IBM Enhances Cloud-Based Analytics and Consulting Services with Twitter Partnership

Twitter and IBM have formed a new partnership to help improve how businesses and institutions understand their customers, markets and trends – and inform every business decision. The alliance brings together Twitter data with IBM’s cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms, and consulting services. 

The collaboration will focus on 3 key areas:  

1. Integration of Twitter data with IBM analytics services on the cloud: IBM says it will offer Twitter data as part of select cloud-based services, including IBM Watson Analytics, a new cognitive service that brings intuitive visualization and predictive capabilities to business users; 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. 
2. New data-intensive capabilities for the enterprise: IBM and Twitter plan to provide enterprise applications to help improve business decisions.The first joint solution will integrate Twitter data with IBM ExperienceOne customer engagement solutions, allowing sales, marketing, and customer service professionals to map sentiment and behavior to better engage and support their customers. 
3. 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. The partnership will draw upon the skills of tens of thousands of IBM Global Business Services consultants and application professionals including consultants from the industry’s only integrated Strategy and Analytics practice, and IBM Interactive Experience, the world’s largest digital agency. 

“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,” said 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.”

With the development of new solutions to improve business decisions across industries and professions, IBM and Twitter will be able to enhance existing enterprise data streams to improve business decisions. For example, IBM says, 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.

For more information regarding the new Twitter and IBM collaboration, visit www.ibm.com/IBMandTwitter.