IBM plans to use Twitters’ public pulse with its customer engagement platforms and consulting services to transform the way businesses and institutions understand their customers, markets and tools.  

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty says she worked “personally” on the partnership deal with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, according to the Business Insider report

The recent partnership is very similar to that of IBM’s deal with Apple in which it offered iPhones and iPads loaded with applications geared towards enterprise clients. 

How Twitter data will be integrated

The report says there are a few aspects to the recent partnership: the data accumulated from Twitter will be integrated into IBM’s big data analytics tool such as Watson Analytics, from there it will be added to IBM’s BlueMix host apps cloud system.

This process will then enable developers to write and enterprise their apps including Twitter’s data, while also allowing businesses to include Twitter data when analyzing their business. 

IBM will be developing new apps for those who need to make use of Twitter data while it has also set out to employ and train 10,000 new consultants to write customised enterprise apps that use twitter data, according to the report. 

Both companies have said the goal is not just about watching for a company’s name being mentioned in Twitter or analysing sentiment, but rather to help companies make business decisions by mining Twitter. 

Making Twitter data available for analysis

Vice president of business development Chris Moody, said the recent partnership has been years in the making.

He wrote in a blog recently posted on Twitter: “Twitter’s data efforts started when we first made our public data available for analysis. 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”. 

Enterprise clients will now be able to filter the data based on different geographical positions, public biographical information and the emotion expressed in a persons tweet. 

While there are other analytics softwares available for businesses, Twitter hopes its recent partnership will draw in more customers.

In an article published by reuters.com,  IBM’s Rometty says the partnership is a huge milestone for the company.  “Twitter has created something extraordinary. When you bring this together with other kinds of information and leverage IBM’s innovations in analytics, business decision making will never be the same. 

“Data is the phenomenon of our time,” says Rometty.