IBM, Twitter announce cloud data services for business professionals

IBM and Twitter on Tuesday announced the availability of industry-first cloud data services that allow business professionals and developers to extract actionable business insights from Twitter data.

By Parthasarathi Biswas

With more than 100 early client engagements underway, the IBM and Twitter global partnership is already helping enterprise clients apply social data to business decisions.

For business professionals to do more than social listening – to be able to use Twitter data to inform their organisation’s most essential decisions- they must first isolate the signal from the noise.

IBM does this by enriching and analyzing Twitter data in combination with millions of data points from other streams of public and business data – such as weather forecasts, sales information and product inventory stats – to uncover powerful correlations that drive more actionable insights.

“So much of business decision making relies on internal data such as sales, promotion and inventory. Now with Twitter data, customer feedback can easily be incorporated into decision making,” said Chris Moody, Vice President of Data Strategy at Twitter. “IBM’s unique capabilities can help businesses leverage this valuable data, and we expect to see rapid demand in retail, telecommunications, finance and more.”

The new IBM analytics services on the cloud will help businesses and developers:

Create Social Data-Enabled Apps: Developers and entrepreneurs can search, quickly explore and then mine enriched Twitter content and aggregated insights through IBM’s Insights for Twitter service on Bluemix.

Merge Sophisticated, Predictive Analytics with Twitter Data: By automating the steps of data curation, predictive analysis and visual storytelling, Watson Analytics can give business professionals the ability to immediately pull Twitter data into any project.

More Easily Analyze Twitter Data: With select cluster configurations of BigInsights on Cloud pre-configured with access to Twitter content, clients can combine Twitter data with IBM’s full-featured Enterprise Hadoop-as-a-Service offering also available through IBM Bluemix.