Feature
IBM and Twitter have joined forces in the red-hot enterprise analytics software market.
The social media platform will integrate its data into IBM's Watson cloud analytics portfolio, customer engagement capabilities and consulting services in what company officials call a "landmark" partnership announced today at IBM Insight, the Armonk, NY-based technology giant's big data and analytics conference in Las Vegas.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the Insight crowd today that no one matches Twitter's ability to deliver real time insights from the real world.
"And IBM brings a unique ability" to deliver analytics, complex systems and data together for deeper trends and insights, he added.
Jolt Needed
Both companies need a boost. Neither made money this year as they hoped.
IBM's cloud investments are not up to snuff. Twitter disappointed investors earlier in the year.
In the land of software revenue, IBM and Twitter want earthquake-rattling type success to boost investor confidence. Maybe Kevin Spacey's F-bombed-laced keynote today will do the trick (he was hilarious).
The partnership certainly seems unprecedented -- a true business partnership of one of the two most popular social media networks and an enterprise software giant. (Wake up, Mr. Zuckerberg).
What's next? Oracle and Facebook? SAP and LinkedIn? Microsoft and Pinterest?
Naturally this isn't the first partnership between an enterprise focused entity and a consumer one. Remember, IBM and Apple locked up for a massive partnership in July.
Will IBM and Twitter start a business-consumer business partnership trend?
Inside IBM-Twitter
Officials from each company at today's conference kept referring to better business decision-making. How it will never be the same. How Watson Analytics and IBM BlueMix will be leveraged with Twitter data in one centralized place for data and analytics.
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Specifically, the alliance features:
- IBM offering Twitter data as part of select cloud-based services, including IBM Watson Analytics; a cloud-based data refinery service; integration of Twitter data into new cloud services built with IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud or IBM Bluemix platform-as-a-service.
- IBM and Twitter delivering a set of enterprise applications by integrating Twitter data with IBM ExperienceOne customer engagement solutions
- IBM Global Business Services professionals accessing Twitter data, and IBM and Twitter collaborating to develop solutions for specific industries such as banking, consumer products, retail and travel and transportation.
“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,” Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and CEO, said in a statement. “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.”
Title image by Michael Costello (Flickr) via a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license
