The micro blogging website Twitter and the American multinational technology and consulting company IBM Corp. have entered a long-term partnership. This partnership will allow IBM to use Twitter’s data for solving business problems. This new deal has been designed for forming an alliance between IBM’s consulting staff and analytics software and the huge volume of data Twitter produces about its users’ opinions and actions.
As a result of this tie-up, IBM will get access to the entire stream of tweets posted on the micro-blogging platform; these include both the current tweets and tweets generated since Twitter’s birth in 2006. All these information from Twitter will be shared with around 10,000 consultants of the American tech firm, which they will use for solving client issues.
Twitter is planning to work with IBM for getting new services and applications developed based on these data. The two partners said that from now on 3rd-party developers will be allowed to incorporate Twitter data into all cloud services built (this is only applicable for cloud services built after the partnership was announced) using Blue Bird’s tools.
IBM and Twitter also has plans of jointly developing offerings for some particular industries such as retail, transportation, travel, banking, consumer products, and so on.
This deal holds great importance for both companies, more so for IBM. This is the tech firm’s second biggest pact of 2014 after its deal with Apple, which was finalized in July. In July, Apple announced that it has joined hands with IBM for creating business applications and selling iPads and iPhones to the corporate customers of IBM.
IBM is looking for new avenues probably because of the struggle it faced recently. The past few months have been extremely tough for the company as it has struggled significantly to get hold of new growth tools as revenue generated by its software and consulting business has reduced by big margins.
Virginia Rometty, IBM”s current chief executive officer, who took office in 2012, has picked a field called “big data” to form the basis of her new strategy. To make her strategy successful, she has personally communicated with Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo, initially for negotiations and then finally for forming the partnership.
According to Rometty, with this partnership, the whole idea of decision-making in businesses is going to change. To know exactly how all these will change the process of decision-making in corporations, however, we’ll have to wait for some more time.