IBM and Twitter just announced a new partnership, something along the same lines as IBM's partnership with Apple.
IBM is going to help businesses use Twitter data to help them understand their customers, businesses and other trends.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty worked "personally" together on the deal, Rometty said in an IBM conference that announced the deal.
There are three parts to the partnership.
1. Twitter data will be integrated into IBM's big data analytics tools like Watson Analytics. And it will be added to IBM's BlueMix, its cloud that hosts apps. This will allow developers to write enterprise apps that include Twitter data, and will allow businesses to include Twitter data when analyzing their business.
2. IBM will be developing new apps for the enterprise that make use of Twitter data. The first one is an app that helps companies better engage their customers over Twitter, Rometty said on Wednesday.
3. IBM will also be training 10,000 consultants to write custom enterprise apps that use Twitter data.
This is not just about watching for a company's name mentioned in Twitter, or analyzing sentiment, the companies said. The goal is to help companies make business decisions by mining Twitter.
A blog posted by Twitter's Chris Moody, vice president of data strategy, explained:
Something we hear consistently is that companies want guidance on how to incorporate Twitter data into their business operations. Our relationship with IBM will directly address this need by training tens of thousands of IBM Global Business Services consultants on the business applications for Twitter data...
And to ensure that companies maximize the value of this new data set, IBM and Twitter will work together on a unique collection of enterprise solutions that include Twitter data in IBM’s analytics solutions. ...
This announcement has been years in the making. Twitter’s data efforts started when we first made our public data available for analysis. Since then, we’ve made great progress in getting social data into the hands of decision makers. Our acquisition of Gnip earlier this year was an important milestone because it gives us an enterprise-grade platform that delivers more than 15 billion social activities per day to a vibrant ecosystem of customers and partners who are innovating using this data. As a result, we have a strong platform for data that makes our relationship with IBM possible.
